Fixing a World That Fosters Fat

“Why are Americans getting fatter and fatter? The simple explanation is that we eat too much junk food and spend too much time in front of screens — be they television, phone or computer — to burn off all those empty calories. One handy prescription for healthier lives is behavior modification. If people only ate more fresh produce. (Thank you, Michael Pollan.) If only children exercised more. (Ditto, Michelle Obama.) Unfortunately, behavior changes won’t work on their own without seismic societal shifts, health experts say, because eating too much and exercising too little are merely symptoms of a much larger malady. The real problem is a landscape littered with inexpensive fast-food meals; saturation advertising for fatty, sugary products; inner cities that lack supermarkets; and unhealthy, high-stress workplaces. In other words: it’s the environment, stupid. ‘Everyone knows that you shouldn’t eat junk food and you should exercise,’ says Kelly D. Brownell, the director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. ‘But the environment makes it so difficult that fewer people can...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/business/22stream.html?_r=1&src=busln