Misremembering What Makes Us Fat

There is a particular irony in marking the occasion of Memorial Day by misremembering history. TIME Magazine’s cover story about why diets fail so many of us, and why so many of us are fat, is thus almost as ironic as it is interesting. The article apparently misremembers, and all but fails to mention, the most fundamental, influential, and flagrant of explanations for our obesity problem. But we’ll come back to that. The article, entitled “The Weight Loss Trap: Why Your Diet Isn’t Working,” principally explores and justifies the welling interest in personalized approaches to everything. While American culture has long been “me”-oriented in comparison to most of the world and much of history, we have apparently taken it to a whole new level now. I hear routinely at conferences that millennials don’t want generic health messages; they want information customized just for them. Children of a cyberspatial age, they are used to it; they expect it. Weight loss and health goals are, naturally, caught up in this prevailing cultural flow. To some extent, that can be a good thing, and this is where TIME’s article has its merit. There are, indeed, variations in genes, metabolic responses, and the microbiome that predict the best variation on the theme of eating well for any one of us seeking to be lean and healthy. So where is the irony? Memorial Day is about remembering, and the article ...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news