Blog #54, August 1, 2026

The U.S. is a big nation, with the most obesity of any large country. Why? Economic historian John Komlos has come up with a comprehensive explanation looking at long-term trends that takes into account food industry practices and the major re-tooling of society. Sizing down will be a huge challenge.

While our growing wider became quite visible in the last 50 years, it began long before, during profound parallel changes between the physical work environment and how we lived our lives. As a species, we evolved adaptations to store energy whenever food supplies might be limited. Calorie-dense foods made the process efficient. As a mark of success, we have been around for some 500,000 years in our more or less current form.

But over the last 100 years, we have become the equivalent of mouse workers as we move a so-called rodent across a pad requiring little energy and then exercising our fingers. Manual labour has been transitioned to a service economy characterized by various forms of clerical work requiring little caloric expenditure. Strenuous physical work has been replaced by machines, assembly lines, robots, all enhanced by electrification and fossil fuels. Concurrently, sanitary improvements led to a society where death was less likely to come from infectious diseases of young organs that required substantial food energy to fight. Death now comes predominantly from metabolic afflictions of old arteries, conditions such as hypertension, and diabetes, as well as cancers that require little energy to sustain life until demise. Increasing body weight concomitantly accompanied these technological changes.

In the early part of the last century, innovative mechanical changes such as public transportation, the automobile, and home radio promoted sedentary leisure. After World War II came television, the remote control, computers, and the internet. Rather than playing sports, we used the media to watch others burn the calories. Foods changed too.

In the 1940s and early 50s, our family’s food sources were the local butcher, the baker, the milkman and others; we ate seasonal food prepared by our mothers who then preserved some for winter. As women entered the workforce, the food environment transitioned from home-cooked meals requiring considerable time to prepare to more convenient calorie-dense canned foods, TV dinners, and frozen foods. Fast food chains proliferated from the 1950s to transform the food landscape. Suburbanization and the automobile entrenched a calorie-rich diet, often take-out, and a sedentary lifestyle into the fabric of everyday life. Today you can have your food prepared and delivered to your door! We are less likely to eat at traditional meal times but snack continuously. Marketing has had a huge impact.

Television advertising catalyzed the obesogenic environment. TV ads weakened willpower and promoted a culture of immediate gratification through emotional conditioning. As American children spent more time in front of screens than time in school, hundreds of targeted commercials for tantalizing foods and toys flooded their brains. Advertisers even advised children on how to nag parents to get what they wanted. By appealing to joy, desire and belonging, advertisers, especially aiming at children, fostered the lifelong impulse to buy products and eat food. Where did the money come from? Today we live in the moment and no longer save for the future through increasing personal debt. Credit card debt has increased a hundred-fold over the last half-century. Ads are effective.

Repetitive advertising, especially to children, targets the brain’s dopamine-driven reward circuits to undermine rational self-control and normalize immediate gratification. Today’s social media compounds the problem with modern-day influencers. This industry pays people handsomely to make us buy stuff we don’t need with money we don’t have and that we don’t enjoy. We live in a 24/7 global, information-saturated, rapid-fire culture that we crave despite how much it stresses us out. That immense stress causes us to eat comfort foods, those high in tasty fat and sugar, to ease the tension we feel. The industry works well and generates great profits.

Big Food describes the multinational food and beverage conglomerates controlling much of the food supply, often through unhealthy processes such as opposing regulation of sugar-sweetened drinks and foods. This McDonaldization of society has made everything predictable and efficient while giving us a sense of power that is quite limited. Big Food uses the same successful techniques as Big Pharma, which got us consuming very profitable maintenance pharmaceuticals for diseases rather than attempting to prevent or cure them. We’ve become a highly stressed, fast-food nation.

Stress in early life, beginning in the womb, increases the chances of being born prematurely and being of low birthweight. Such conditions program the child to store calories to survive in anticipation of hunger. U.S. high rates of low birthweight and prematurity program our high levels of child obesity. Child abuse is also obesogenic. Increasing economic inequality, resulting from political choices made by Americans, is an upstream harbinger that causes the stress so many of us face. Our dimensions have changed.

Americans used to be among the tallest people in the world, but now we are the widest. We are talking about averages, of course. Some of you may be svelte and others short, some both. But more likely you are king/super-sized. This varies across the nation, with more obesity in the same areas where life is shorter, including the Mississippi Valley, Appalachia and the South-East. There is an ethnic distinction with non-Whites being bigger, the result of racial discrimination.

Other forms of favouritism work against obese people. They are less desirable relationship partners, and less likely to be hired compared to slender folk. These days ultrathin seems to be in. Being big costs everyone.

Obesity costs in pay-outs to the healthcare industry not only for trying to treat the condition but also for concomitant worse health. Today there is a gold mine in selling the very expensive GLP-1 weight loss drugs whose long-term health benefits remain unclear. These drugs are found to be even consumed by those with eating disorders, such as anorexia nervosa, who strive to be thinner. Consider though the lack of economic productivity resulting from being too big to work well. What are we told to do?

The Federal government and many other influencers advise us to eat healthy and exercise more. While exercising more is good for everyone, one can’t burn off the excess calories stored in big bodies. When we exercise, appetite tends to increase while our bodies become metabolically more efficient. It is a lose-lose game. Or more accurately, a get bigger game. America has a huge problem.

Despite the health and longevity movements in the United States touting various nostrums, the healthiest or at least the longest-lived person is never in the U.S. We need policies for a basic re-tooling of society that is in line with who we humans are as a species. This will require a revolution as significant as the one that brought us the technological and corporate societal changes that changed the basic fabric of American life. The challenge we face is to restore the nation to some semblance of what it was in the 1950s when we were one of the healthiest countries worldwide. There is no easy fix for this wicked problem.

Stephen Bezruchka, Seattle, Washington