Western culture bears a weight that it struggles to shift. Two recent stories perhaps expose why.
The first is an investigation by Australia’s drug regulator into online influencers and platforms promoting a diabetes drug for weight-loss. Ozempic is on the pharmaceutical benefits scheme for treatment of type 2 diabetes but has been prescribed “off label” by doctors to those struggling to manage their weight.
TikTok influencers have discovered it and – despite the risk of side-effects including pancreatic inflammation, diarrhoea and thyroid tumours – there is now a worldwide shortage of the stuff. The AMA is demanding the drug be quarantined for diabetics while supplies are restored.
The second story involves Elise Stefanik of New York – one of the highest-ranking Republicans in the US Congress – preparing federal legislation to force the provision of high-calorie flavoured milk to children in school lunch programs. Her “Save Chocolate Milk!” campaign results from Democratic New York City mayor, Eric Adams, proposing its removal from school lunch menus.
Adams’ concern is that supplying sugary drinks to children causes diabetes and obesity; after his own diabetes diagnosis, Adams resorted to veganism. Stefanik’s campaign spruiks for the dairy industry, demonising the diabetic mayor as a “health nanny”.
Australia may seem far away from the Republican force-feed of chocolate milk and propaganda, but the powerful emotional and economic forces that underlie a cynical political calculus churn together here, too.
According to the World Health Organization definition, 1.9 billion adults are considered overweight. Of these, more than 650 million people are classified as obese.
In Australia, health authorities suggest being overweight is more dangerous to us than alcohol, and only second in “preventable health risk” to smoking. ABS health data claims 67% of Australian adults are overweight, an increase on 63.4% a decade ago. Last year, Australia’s former conservative government released a “National Obesity Strategy”, concerned Australia was facing health risks of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancers.
That government did recognise weight is influenced by complex “social, environmental, and economic factors”, but their framework of encouraging “healthy choices” as a remedy unhelpfully individualises a collective problem. First, shaming individuals into weight loss doesn’t work: research has shown – since 1959 – 95% of weight loss attempts fail. Two-thirds of dieters regain the weight they lose.
Second, the structural giveaway here is an admission that the poorest “experience the greatest burden of disease linked to excess weight”. Our societies have never produced so much food, yet we live in a capitalist perversion where fresh, healthy food – and the time to prepare it – are priced as a luxury, while highly processed items are inexpensive, easy and aggressively mass-marketed.
The data’s long in that it’s not a failure of collective willpower that’s jeopardising our health, but a diet of bad food that’s culturally familiar, low in nutrition and super available.
It wasn’t ideological conversion that transformed me from rabid anti-McDonald’s activist at university to sucking down cheeseburgers as a young adult in London: it was being sad, trapped in low-income casual jobs and seeing a recognisable hot meal advertised for only £2 on a cold day. As the marketing departments of Big Junk know: bad food is cheap comfort with a great profit margin.
Yet while westerners have never been so large, societal beauty standards remain uncomfortably svelte. The Ozempic shortage suggests the strength of “body positivity” campaigns is yet to dint the “thinspiration” offered by social media influencers, celebrities and decades of habit. After my cheeseburger winter, not even London’s walkability and subsidised gyms were enough to shift its results; young, dating, image-conscious, I resorted to a weight loss drug.
It worked, mainly due to chemical terrorism; the risk of straying from its recommended diet was explosive steatorrhea. If you want to lose your appetite today, look that up (or just click on that link).
I went off the drug, and the comfort food and kilos all came back. My relationship with weight, food and my body is as complex, contextual and contorted as anyone else’s, a multi-vulnerability that allows capitalism to bite us at all ends.
I’m unlikely to resort to a weight loss product now. Not just because 10 years of “you’re a fat bitch”-level internet salutations inspired in me a doughnut-eating defiance, nor that with the confidence of maturity I abandoned arbitrary beauty demands. It’s because when my cake-loving mother was diagnosed with cancer, her type 2 diabetes precluded her from life-extending chemotherapy, having compromised her kidney function.
I used our time-rich pandemic lockdown confinement to carefully – expensively – “health nanny” her into the ground. She got more months, and eventually even chemo … but too late.
In the process, I lost 21kg; maybe because of our low-junk diet, maybe due to sleepless terror of diabetes, or my broken heart. It hasn’t come back. I’ve lost my taste for sugar. But was it grief or a suddenly bigger mid-life budget for food and of time that showed me what empty comfort doughnuts were?
If it takes buying a drug to cancel out the effects of the junk pushed down our throats, it’s not our flesh that’s weighing us down. It’s the illusion confected by capitalism’s force-feeders that what we consume is ever much of a choice at all.
