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There's a good article on obesity by Marc Ambinder in the May issue of Atlantic. (A top-heavy hat tip to Cardiff Garcia for the find.) Ambinder touches on some of the psychological assaults launched by the "food marketers who deploy psychological deception" against us couch potatoes:
Wide evidence suggests that advertising feeds obesity, triggering what the psychologist Robert Cialdini has called the brain's "click-whirr" response. Recently, for example, psychologists at Yale University showed a cartoon to two groups of children. One group saw food commercials interlaced between segments; the other viewed the cartoon with commercials, but not for food products. Both groups were given a snack to eat while watching. The children who saw the food ads ate nearly 50 percent more of the snack they were offered. It didn't seem to matter what the advertised food actually was: "Across diverse populations," wrote the researchers, "food advertising that promoted snacking, fun, happiness, and excitement (i.e., the majority of children's food advertisements) directly contributed to increased food intake."
Ambinder doesn't give an exact citation, but he's referring to this study led by Jennifer Harris (pdf here). The authors found that both children and adults consumed more after exposure to food ads, regardless of reported hunger levels. They conclude:
These experiments demonstrate the power of food advertising to prime automatic eating behaviors and thus influence far more than brand preference alone.
One of the study's coauthors, Kelly D. Brownell, of "Super Size Me" fame, was featured in an APS Observer cover story on obesity published a few years back, while I was at the magazine. In the piece, Brownell said that while it's easy to blame individuals for over-consumption—at least one Atlantic commenter does just that—such an approach is futile if you really want to solve the problem:
Blaming individuals with the problem, pounding the table with exhortations for increased personal responsibility, and protecting food industry interests by insuring the status quo has been tried for years and has failed, but is precisely what many in government propose as a means for moving ahead.
The Atlantic piece includes a video of Ambinder's startling weight loss following a process known as bariatric surgery:
