Fast food restaurants have taken a beating for decades. Even tons of advertising and promised changes in response to critics haven’t helped much. Witness the success of the documentary Super Size Me and the book and now movie Fast Food Nation.
And yet business is brisk.
As reported in a recent issue of New Scientist, a researcher in Sweden is looking into the effects of a fast food diet-more or less a Super Size Me clinical study. The article seemed to take glee in the results so far: some people gained weight, but others didn’t-even on 6,000 calories per day.
None of the study’s results have been published, so all we have is the New Scientist interview with the researcher Fredrik Nyström and two of the study’s participants. However, it’s obvious that the center of gravity for this work is the much dreaded obesity epidemic. You’ve no doubt heard of this or even been caught in its clutches: the panic arising from the theory that excess body weight is a disease that causes all sorts of bad things like diabetes and heart attacks and liver damage and on and on.
It’s nonsense, of course. Excess body weight isn’t a disease. It’s a symptom. It’s your body talking to you, telling you that something isn’t working right.
The fact that the New Scientist article appears in the absence of any published results makes me suspicious. It seems more like an opportunity to thumb a journalistic nose at the popular nemesis of junk food. Nevertheless, some of the bits of information doled out are interesting.
What participants noticed most was not the weight they did or did not gain, but that they never got hungry. They missed it. They also missed being physically active, since the study required participants to minimize their exercise.
What caught my attention most was that the two participants interviewed for the article reported that their bodies didn’t feel right. The young man who gained virtually no weight on 6,600 calories per day said, “I felt disgusting.” He also reported that walking had become a major chore. The young woman who did gain weight on 5,000 calories per day said psychologically, “I feel very, very good but the physical part is bad.”
It’s clear to me that the direction of this research is to find out how to identify people who can stay thin from people who cannot. No doubt there will be some new genetic tests and tests for protein markers that will sort out who’s who. At the same time pharmaceuticals will be developed that will coax a body prone to weight gain into acting more like a thin body.
What does this research tell you about how to take care of yourself? Each of us has a unique biology. Each person’s biology responds in a unique way to fast food as well as to food generally, physical activity, and exposures toxins, allergens, and stress. If you “feel bad,” your unique biology is trying to protect you. It’s saying, “Stop.” It’s saying, “Give me what I need.”
The study participants challenged their unique biology so much that it was screaming at them. The experiment became a kind of aversion therapy.
What if you can’t hear what your unique biology is telling you? That’s what the science of fast food is all about. It’s food designed to be desirable, even addictive (although that word is not used in polite society). Isn’t addiction a kind of “feeling bad?”
OK, so fast food is an easy target. What about other foods you can’t live without or physical activity or toxins or allergens or stress and their effect on you? What if you’re so used to “feeling bad” that you accept it as normal? Listen. Your body is talking.
