We Are What We Eat: Where Is America's Leadership?

One of the attributes of a great image is its ability to convey vast amounts of information and meaning quickly and simply. Here's a terrific example.

In one of his typically astute comments, Barry Carol alerted us to a wonderfully clever graphic by Wellington Gray, displaying the percentage of people older than 15 in different developed countries with a Body Mass Index greater than 30. In other words, the percentage of fat adults.

At 31% of our adult population, the US has the most obesity by far, fully 20-25 percent higher than our closest competitors in the race to lifestyle oblivion, Mexico and the UK. At the skinny end of the scale, France, Austria and Italy are at 9%, and Norway is at 8%. The ridiculously industrious Koreans and Japanese are hovering around 3%, or about 1/10th of our obesity problem.

Of course the subtext of this graphic is that we can see immediately who has an advantage or a disadvantage on cost, productivity and competitiveness in the increasingly global marketplace. The US' unbridled lust for poor food and inactivity, urged on by the industries that profit from those traits, will translate to the biggest costs and the lowest productivity, and these influences will undermine our long term competitiveness. The Japanese and Koreans, who take the term "lean" seriously, will whip our fat asses.

The obesity problem, like the health care problem, is a matter of national will, policy and lobbying. As long as the agriculture and junk food, prepared food and fast food sectors lobby unimpeded for tax subsidies for low nutrition foods, open access for their advertising to our children and murky information about what's in the stuff we stuff down our gullets, they'll prosper and America will decline.

The rules that guide how businesses behave are decided in policy. Effecting change will require that our nation's non-agriculture and non-food business leaders, our most influential individuals, come together and collectively determine that change is necessary. They must decide that it is in their economic interests for American workers to be healthy so they can be productive, and so that productivity can translate to competitiveness.

As with health care reform, meaningful reform on behalf of America will require convergence with the expediencies of power. Under our current system, nothing else can accomplish the change we so desperately need.

We Are What We Eat: Where Is America's Leadership?

Wednesday, October 17, 2007