This is a YouTube video titled "Challenging The Notion That It's Our Fault We're Overweight" containing a recorded conversation from September 2, 2018, featuring Ask AI Mark and Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian discussing obesity, the limitations of blaming individual willpower, and the need for systemic changes in food policy and environment to address global obesity issues.
And the basic idea here in America is that if you eat too much and you don't exercise enough, you're going to gain weight. And if you can't control your behavior and stop eating and exercise more, then there's something wrong with you. And you challenge that notion that it's not really our fault, we're fat, that there's something else going on in the biology of this, that all calories are not the same, then that has implications for Policy, food environments and other things. Let's dig into that one.
Yeah. Well, you know, I think that, you know, blaming individual people for obesity and saying that we just have to everybody has to have better willpower and eat less and move more would have been like, you know, looking at the incredible deaths from car accidents in the 30s and 40s and 50s and saying we just have to tell the drivers to drive better. Right. We don't need to change the car. We don't need to change the road. We don't need to change.
Yeah.
Let's just keep the cars the way they are. Let's keep the roads the way they are. Let's keep the Speed limits or lack of speed limits the way they are, let's let people drink and drive and then just blame it on the individual driver. So, so what we did for car safety was we changed the product, we changed the environment, the road, and we changed the culture around drunk driving. That's the roadmap to a healthier food system. It's not focusing on the consumer, but change the environment, the environment, the grocery stores, the restaurants, the supermarkets, the cafeterias, change the products, the foods themselves, and change the culture in this case. around healthy or unhealthy eating. But I think to get back to calories, the reason it's so clear that this isn't about individual willpower is when we start to see four-year-olds and five-year-olds and six-year-olds overweight and obese now, not only in our country but worldwide.
Three-year-olds with type 2 diabetes in some Native American communities.
It's shocking. You can't say willpower has changed in 20 years in these young kids and it's their fault.
Right?
There's systematic problems. Every country in the world has increasing obesity, every country in the world. So there's clearly systematic global problems going on with our food system. So I think that while the saturated fat being more or less as a class neutral and having variation depending on the food is more and more accepted, I think that's less fringe and actually more widely accepted, I think that the the calorie hypothesis is still going full steam ahead in terms of science and policy.
