I watched the Supersize Me tonight. Very disturbing. The guy’s liver basically shuts down after eating nothing but McDonald’s for a month.
He talks about many reasons why the growth in fast food in America and it’s incumbent obesity in the US. Increased marketing to children, the addictive quality of the foods, it’s low cost are all factors. One thing he touches on very early on in the film and never comes back to, is how his mother cooked meals for him every day. He was a healthy guy before he went on his Mac Attack. This leads us to believe that his mother was a positive role model for him in helping him choose healthy eating habits. He contrasts this to the rise in obesity currently, saying that families eat out more often now than they used to. 40% of meals are eaten outside the home was the figure quoted. When they do eat in, it’s frozen or prepared foods.
I think it would be an interesting study to see how the growth of women in the workforce parallels the growth in obesity in the US. Working mothers don’t have time to plan and prepare healthy meals for their kids. So they either eat out at places like McDonalds, order pizza, or thaw out a tv dinner for their children.
Now it is very in vogue to fault McDonalds for causing the obesity in this country. But who is feeding their children? Who is teaching them, at a very early age what to eat?
In one interesting bit of the movie, he estimates that children see 10,000 ads for fast food and sugary cereal in a year. He compares this to the number of meals that the parent could prepare for them in a year, 1000. He says, see — parents don’t stand a chance against that much advertisement. But look, as the parent, you can tell your child what to eat. You can turn off the TV. You have control of the stick and the carrot, even if McDonalds does have a pretty appetizing carrot.
Don’t get me wrong, I like a good egg mcmuffin every now and again. Some of my fondest memories figure under those golden arches. When my Grandma Katie took me out to the McDonalds drive-through, when I attended the grand opening of McDonalds in Virginia Beach complete with a half pipe and a bmx crew, my first Monopoly game piece, and my family’s mass migration to Alaska where we marked each passing state by the quality of their McDonald’s restaurant. But it was a treat. We didn’t eat it every day, we were lucky if we ate there once a month.
I also am not sure relegating women only to housework is a good idea, either. But for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In this case, we have done nothing to replace the role of woman as the center of a stable household that taught their children good eating habits. The schools have certainly not done their part, as shown in Super Size Me. Whether it is the man or the woman or a meal preparation service, if you can afford it, healthy eating habits must start at home.
5 responses to “Supersize Me”
I’m not sure that your study of paralleling obesity with increase of number of women in the workforce would be a good study. This may be hiding another cause that may be more pertinent. This phenomenon is seen in some social studies. One example is that with the increased purchase of ice cream, more rapes occur. Does this mean that ice cream is bad for society? The more plausible reason is that more people eat ice cream when the weather is nice. Also more people are out and about so more attacks may occur.
I’ve thougt of a few factors that may explain the increase rate of obesity & eating out. One is the increase of technology so we have more processed foods. Processed/frozen foods are cheaper than buying fresh vegetables, especially when you live in the boon docks like northern BC as opposed to CA. I remember hearing once that processed foods are cheaper than non-processed foods for low-income families in the US.
Another factor may be is that there is an increase of affordable restaurants. My friend moved to Vancouver last year, and when I saw her the following fall, she said that she & her husband eat out b/c it was cheaper for them to pick up a meal than to go to the grocery store.
Also there’s an increase in jobs where individuals just sit at their desks all day and make no time to exercise. Even though I exercise regularly, I have been increasing weight for the past year. I couldn’t figure it out until I realized that this time last year, I had finished doing my lab work, and basically I just sat in front of my computer reading articles and writing my thesis. I hadn’t increased my exercise regime to compensate for the time that I had been just running around in the lab to get things done.
I’m not convinced that women in the workforce is the cause of families to eat out. Of all the families I know where both parents work, most of them eat at home. I think the lack of cooking at home is up to the family and it isn’t fair to pigeon-hole the increase of obesity on women in the workforce.
You raise many good points, and I agree, identifying causation as opposed to correllation get’s you into tricky territory.
Certainly it would be unfair to pin all the causation on the rise of obesity to women in the workforce. There had to be an incumbent increase in the effeciency of the foodservice industry and a lowering of the cost of food. There had to be a growing tendency of people to rely on their automobiles to get around and never excercising. There had to be a tendency to watch 5 hours of TV a day and a rise in office jobs. There had to be an ever increasing size of the Big Gulp, to where folks regularly load up with 2 liters of soda on lunch breaks. And, let us not forget, the tendency to supersize your quarter pounder meal.
So, I agree, many factors contributed to the rise of obesity in the states. But I do think that the rising tendency of people eating out has a large effect on why Americans are so obese.
What I’m trying to figure out is, why do so many Americans eat out now?
I think it has to do with all the factors I laid out above, and the fact that there is no one planning meals for most families. Another fact quoted in the movie was that a majority of Americans have no idea what they are going to eat for dinner at 4:00 pm. Myself included. Before women joined the workforce, this was a non-issue. There was going to be a well planned meal ready when everyone got home from school and work.
Now, I am not saying that women in the workforce are the sole cause and that if you put them back in the home where they belong, barefoot and pregnant, all social ills will go away. It’s a fact of life of 21st century America that women are going to work. So, how do we as a socity cope with this change? How do we have married couples with children where both the mother and the father work and make time to plan healthy meals and excersise so we can teach our children how to make healthy choices later in life?
What do we do to educate them not to make bad choices?
I agree with Ed that a partial cause of the rise in obesity is probably that fewer women spend the time, money, and effort to feed healthy meals to their families. And, I agree with Kei that the rise in obesity is not caused by women working; it’s caused by no one filling the role that women used to fill.
Changing people’s lifestyles is very difficult. There is an element of education, but habit is also an important factor. People can, and sometimes do, change their behavior as a result of learning that it would be good for them to do so, but it doesn’t work nearly as well as might be naively supposed. I ought to draw some conlculsion from this observation, but more pressingly, I ought to get back to my Econ homework.
I will close with a butchered quote from an ex-surgeon general:
If you don’t have time, or money, to eat healthy food, you’d better be saving up a lot of both for when your in the hospital later.
Spoken like a true economist. Do you do couples counseling as well?
Like a true economist, as long as the marginal benefit is greater than the marginal return, I’ll do it. No, that would be a selfish economist. As your economic advisor, I advise you not to get counseling from a dilletant academic; if you did, it would be because of a market failure, imperfect information.