Gorging On Mea Culpas

The cover story of the March 13, 2006 issue of Newsweek is about the confusion that results when the media try to sum up the latest research in diets. Things, it seems, are over-simplified and often misreported. So this is another example of the media eating crow by exposing how the media has a bad influence on us. But even if you’re tired of the media’s navel gazing, the article does reveal what we value in our society – better and longer life through proper observance of nutritional intake.

The article points out that there has been a steady increase in TV news pieces on food and nutrition and health in general. And that only happens because there is a demand for this focus. How healthy our foods are presumably affects everyone. And many people are frustrated when cult diets come and nutrients like calcium, bran, milk, eggs, coffee, and wine rise and fall in the popular estimation like gods in a modern pantheon.

The question is: to what extent is the media to blame for our confusion? Yes, a TV piece is bound to shorten things, being a visual diet of brief scenes and sounds bytes that are the aural equivalent of two-bite brownies. Things are going to get lost as the story ingredients are cooked into a five-minute soufflé. But the Newsweek article gives too much credit to the medical and scientific community. This is the same community that brought you leeches as a treatment for various illnesses. Uh… bad example, actually, as some practitioners are currently reviving the use of leeches in certain kinds of post-operative scenarios. Someday we may look back at the brief period when we didn’t resort to leeches as a time of medical ignorance. My point is that our store of medical knowledge is constantly being remaindered and restocked. And you can see this flux in the ever-changing news about what foods are good for you and are not good for you.

It’s the kind of contentious debate that a book like The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession With Weight Is Hazardous To Your Health indulges in. Author Paul Campos takes things beyond the mere eccentricities of diet and hits us with the big question: why are we so obsessed with whether or not we or others are fat? He launches into studies that show that moderately obese people are actually healthier overall than moderately underweight people. (Okay, so I’m maybe oversimplifying. Woo hoo! I guess that makes me a member of the media.) But in the process he points out that how we define obesity has changed over the years. And let’s face it, when some studies argue that 70% of Americans are overweight and that only 10% of people who manage to lose weight actually keep it off, we’re facing a long uphill struggle against impossible odds. Why are so many people so obsessed?

Of course, this focus on food isn’t new to humankind. Various religions have had and continue to have dietary proscriptions based on beliefs about good and evil. What’s interesting to me is how the language of ‘being bad’ and ‘being weak’ once used to define the ‘sinner’ in religious society where now, in a secular society, these descriptions characterize the person who has fallen off their diet or who can’t even bring themselves to get on one. The sinners are the overweight, and, lo, we can see their sins hang upon them and drag them down. So have we really changed all that much as a species? People used to count their rosaries, atone for their sins, and buy relics of the saints to help them on their way to heaven while now they count their calories, atone for their snacks and buy wristbands and exercise machines from late-night celebrity-hosted infomercials. When someone says their body is their temple, I’m sure they really mean it because they don’t have a sense of other dimensions to their existence.

Never mind that our picayune dietary concerns are almost obscene given that, and I’ll be maudlin for a moment, so many people on the planet don’t have enough to eat. Never mind that all the energy we put into being careful about milligrams and organic might be better spent redistributing food to where it is truly needed. But I don’t need to tell you to never mind, I know you will. But what the religious model of the new body as the stand-in for the soul reveals is that we are obsessed because we are attempting the impossible. Just as religious devotees come to be frustrated by the inability of the individual to consistently and gladly conform to the dogma of the divine, so too do our individual bodies resist broad one-trick schemes to make us all look more like some predetermined ideal. The soul and the body are in complete agreement here: you can’t make them do what they won’t do. They frustrate our doctrine of free will and self-determination and the ancient fascist ideal of the perfectibility of humankind. They tell us that the self is not in control.

The contradictory reports that we see on the media and from the medical community, then, are glaring reminders of what many people can’t accept. And so we try to blame someone because that’s how superstition works. The medical community blames the media, the media mea culpa’s itself and then blames the consumers, the consumers blame the professionals and, finally, everyone blames the overweight because their fat doesn’t act in a predictable way and because they have an ungodly obsession with food.