Sick Planet: Our Obsession with Dieting Boosts the Economy But Destroys the Earth

By Stan Cox, Pluto Press. Posted May 28, 2008.

Editor's Note: Below is an excerpt from chapter 4 of the new book, Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine, by one of AlterNet's favorite writers, Stan Cox and reprinted with permission of Pluto Press. The book draws the link between Western big business and environmental destruction, covering everything from energy to health care to the foods we eat. Chapter 4, "Swallowing the Earth whole," begins by looking back at an analysis of the low-carbohydrate Atkins Diet originally done by Cox and Marty Bender in 2003. They concluded that if the then-enormously popular diet regimen were adopted by all overweight people, the impact on global ecosystems and resources would be heavy. The chapter continues:

Now that Atkins has taken its bows and yielded the stage to competitors, we can look back and see that it didn't really matter whether it was a real or fake commodity. It did what commodities do, generating a lot of economic activity and using up a lot of resources. Despite scares over mad cow disease in 2004, the price of a live steer in Texas hit 84 cents per pound, up from 67 cents in 2002; turkey consumption in the state shot up 22 percent.

Delighted feedlot and poultry companies credited low-carb eating for much of the boost. The hog population of Iowa rose by 640,000. Earnings on shares of Smithfield Foods, Inc., at the time the nation's largest producer of hogs, fresh pork, and processed meats, increased more than tenfold. A couple of years later, the CEO of Tyson Foods, Inc., America's biggest meat producer, responded with a kind of nostalgia to a March, 2007 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that the Atkins diet probably had achieved greater weight loss than some other popular diets: ''Atkins was good for demand then and its accolades here recently ... that's good for us and we do appreciate that the Atkins diet gets that kind of recognition."

Atkins was just one phase, if an especially newsworthy one, in the long, meandering evolution of Western dieting. In the years since Marty and I did our analysis, traditional low-carb regimens in the Atkins vein have largely given way to diet plans more focused on the "glycemic index" of carbohydrates and foods. Diet plans, diet foods, devices, drugs, treatments, organizations, and facilities come and go, but one thing never changes: the weight-reduction market never loses economic weight.

In the US alone, sales were $58 billion in 2007, and Marketdata Enterprises, Inc. predicted that they would reach $69 billion by 2010. With the low-carb boom fading, Marketdata saw continued growth in diet plans, diet-food home delivery, diet pharmaceuticals, and bariatric surgery (which drastically reduces the capacity of the stomach).

Marty and I analyzed the ecological impact of the Atkins diet in only one dimension: the nutrient composition of the food consumed. To my knowledge, the total environmental burden has not been estimated for Atkins or any other weight-loss strategy. The foods and other commodities they offer are generally heavily processed, with high packaging-to-product ratios. Anything having to do with medicine can be ecologically pricey, as we saw in Chapters 1 to 3, and health clubs and weight-loss centers have an impact as well.

All weight-loss products and services create a bigger burden than do those old-fashioned, well-proven measures that will be recommended by any nutritionist who isn't trying to sell you something: eating less, eating out rarely, cooking with food in its least-processed form, limiting consumption of animal products, drinking mainly water, avoiding between-meal snacks, and, whenever possible, walking, running or cycling instead of driving. To have all overweight people follow that and other prosaic advice for good health would avert conflict between humans and other animals; it would emphasize our reliance on natural systems; it would be more affordable for everyone regardless of income; and it would probably precipitate an economic crisis.

In a hungry world like this one, to be able to adopt any formal dietary/fitness regimen for purposes of self-improvement is a luxury in itself. In his novel he Comedians, Graham Greene has the narrator, Mr. Brown, make that point to the altruistic Mr. Smith regarding Smith's failed proposal for a "vegetarian center" in Haiti:

Brown: "I don't think they are quite ripe here for vegetarianism."

Smith: "I was thinking the same, but perhaps..."

Brown: "Perhaps you must have enough cash to be carnivorous first."

Nutrition schemes make excellent commodities because they are perennially popular whatever their failure rate. (And failure is the norm; according to a National Institutes of Health panel, "In controlled settings, participants who remain in weight loss programs usually lose approximately 10% of their weight. However, one third to two thirds of the weight is regained within 1 year, and almost all is regained within 5 years.")

See more stories tagged with: atkins, diets, dieting, medicine, corporations, food, sick planet

Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kansas. Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine is his first book.

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