Originally Posted by
Minoosh
This seems like a contradiction to me. It's all fat people's fault, but it's the fault of companies pushing processed food. That's an environmental issue, not a psychological one.
So - could the problem be a bit of both?
Or perhaps a third possibility? One of the more interesting suggestions I’ve seen involves the inverse relationship between obesity and breastfeeding. Depending on the study rates of obesity in children that were exclusively breastfed can be half that of children that received significant amounts of formula. Children who were bottle fed have lower obesity rates than formula fed babies but higher than those fed directly from the breast.
The hypostasis goes that the chemical and philological pathways for deciding “I’ve eaten enough and it’s time to stop” are formed in the first year or so of life, and bottle feeding and formula disrupt this. If true this would mean it’s not a willpower problem, rather people should be stopping without having to make a conscious decision to do so, or use willpower to enforce that decision. Anecdotally obesity rates in adulthood do seem to track pretty well with popularity of formula and bottle-feeding when those adults were infants.