Iobesity kills 5 million people per year (according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation), almost twice as much as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV combined. The life of obese people is severely degraded, whether they die of it or not. The story of obesity is one of a tragedy in slow motion, whose growth is variable but systematic: no country succeeds in bringing it down.
The main cause is known: the evolution of the food system. In France, the proportion of people affected has doubled in less than thirty years, reaching nearly 9 million peoplesays the National Institute of Health and Medical Research. A report has just been handed over to the Ministry of Health. If this document has the merit of highlighting the subject to make it a priority, it did not dare to make large-scale proposals targeting the food industry.
Obesity is a food-borne disease, and its public treatment must be food-based, knowing that we have three main enemies: calories, processing and chemicals, especially pesticides. Nutritional science is exceedingly complex, but the solutions can be simpler.
A forest of risks to avoid
We already know which approaches do not work. They have been tested in most democracies – and even in autocracies – with tiny, if any, or negative effects. They are those who want to reduce demand, by addressing individuals so that they are “reasonable” – a way of humiliating them – without intervening in food risks and industrial practices. The 21st century food systeme century plays again The jungle Book, dropping people into a forest of risks that they must avoid on their own to get out of it. Allowing the supply of risk to grow in the hope that demand will resist is a dream whose result is dramatically ineffective. This individual approach is wrong because it believes it can provide a behavioral response to an environmental problem.
The methods that work to combat a risk are known. These are the ones that attack the supply, not the demand. They pass through the law and the economy, that is to say through regulation and taxation. They have proven themselves by suppressing risks such as tobacco, lead, air pollution in rich countries or even alcohol in certain democracies. However, food is not regulated and is not taxed.
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