This debate started popping up in my social media and news feeds a few months ago, and it surprised me: Is being overweight a choice? There were at least five longform videos and a handful of articles floating around about this topic, and I consumed each one. The common threads among them were that there was very little science, but the opinions of a mixed panel of fitness professionals and enthusiasts alongside body positivity advocates and individuals who struggled with obesity.
Overwhelmingly, the majority of the individuals on these panels felt that being overweight was a deliberate choice. The fitness-minded individuals tended to focus on the axiom of "calories in, calories out" as their irrefutable evidence (in their minds), while some of the body positivity advocates similarly shared anecdotes about times when they did manage to lose weight, and cited those short-term successes as evidence that their obesity must be entirely their choice. This does tend to match my own experiences when I hear people talk about their struggles with weight gain. They tend to cite poor willpower and personal failure when we talk about this topic.
Well, the science does not match up to any of these opinions. Multiple studies show us that the single greatest factor that determines whether someone will be obese is their genetics. The next largest factor was the body composition of the person's parents AT THE TIME OF CONCEPTION. What that means that if an individual was conceived by obese parents, they were significantly more likely to be overweight as a child, all the way into adulthood. Finally, multiple studies over the past 30 years have disproven the adages of willpower being the determining factor for weight loss, and that if you're failing it's because you must lack willpower. Previous and current environment, metabolism, gut microbiome, and the cognitive processing of things like hunger cues are all much greater factors for why our bodies look the way that they do, despite our diet and exercise attempts.
In a lot of ways, part of your destiny was determined by your parents. They aren't the villains of your story by any means; they did their best, and usually repeated what they were exposed to or what was socially acceptable when they raised you. Unless they force-fed you like human foie gras, we cannot blame them for having any sort of malicious intent for how we turned out. The education and information simply was not there! Compare it to parents with kids in school today. Those kids are learning "common core" mathematics principles that their parents never learned. How is the parent expected to automatically reinforce those common core principles if they weren't taught those principles in the first place? The same thing applies to food science and exercise science for wellness and fitness. I can distinctly remember a time in the late 90s, watching the evening news, when a news anchor said that eggs were bad for us one night, and then said eggs were good for us the following night! Several foods were demonized one week and exalted the next week, depending on who was paying for the "research".
That being said, our circumstances are one thing. Our deliberate decisions are another thing. While we aren't always fully responsible for our current circumstances, to include how we were raised and how prepared we were for life when we left home, we can choose to take control of our future. We can educate ourselves on the most effective ways to reach our goals. We can seek expert assistance and guidance, helping us to stay accountable to ourselves. Most of all, we can engage with one another from a place of empathy and not judge someone for their circumstances. You never know their whole story!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
References
1. Piernas C, Aveyard P, Jebb SA. Recent trends in weight loss attempts: repeated cross-sectional analyses from the health survey for England. Int J Obes. 2016;40(11):1754–1759. doi: 10.1038/ijo.2016.141. [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]
2. Piernas C, Harmer G, Jebb SA. Removing seasonal confectionery from prominent store locations and purchasing behaviour within a major UK supermarket: evaluation of a nonrandomised controlled intervention study. PLoS Med. 2022;19(3):e1003951. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1003951. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]
3. Halford JCG, Gillespie J, Brown V, Pontin EE, Dovey TM. Effect of television advertisements for foods on food consumption in children. Appetite. 2004;42(2):221–225. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2003.11.006. [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]
4. Boyland EJ, Harrold JA, Dovey TM, Allison M, Dobson S, Jacobs M-C, Halford JCG. Food choice and overconsumption: effect of a premium sports celebrity endorser. J Pediatr. 2013;163(2):339–343. doi: 10.1016/j.jpeds.2013.01.059. [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]
5. Butland B, Jebb S, Kopelman P, McPherson K, Thomas S, Mardell J, et al. Tackling obesities: future choices. Project report. London: Government Office for Science; 2007.
6. Bandy LK, Scarborough P, Harrington RA, Rayner M, Jebb SA. Reductions in sugar sales from soft drinks in the UK from 2015 to 2018. BMC Med. 2020;18(1):20. doi: 10.1186/s12916-019-1477-4. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]
7. Pell D, Mytton O, Penney TL, Briggs A, Cummins S, Penn-Jones C, Rayner M, Rutter H, Scarborough P, Sharp SJ, et al. Changes in soft drinks purchased by British households associated with the UK soft drinks industry levy: controlled interrupted time series analysis. BMJ. 2021;372:n254. doi: 10.1136/bmj.n254. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar] Retracted
8. Eisend M. The third-person effect in advertising: a meta-analysis. J Advert. 2017;46(3):377–394. doi: 10.1080/00913367.2017.1292481. [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]
9. Morphett K, Partridge B, Gartner C, Carter A, Hall W. Why don’t smokers want help to quit? A qualitative study of smokers' attitudes towards assisted vs. unassisted quitting. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2015;12(6):6591–6607. doi: 10.3390/ijerph120606591. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]
10. Marteau TM, White M, Rutter H, Petticrew M, Mytton OT, McGowan JG, Aldridge RW. Increasing healthy life expectancy equitably in England by 5 years by 2035: could it be achieved? Lancet. 2019;393(10191):2571–2573. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(19)31510-7. [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]
Commentaires