What causes obesity?  Obviously ingesting more calories than a person burns leads to weight gain but what really causes obesity?

Will banning Big Gulps, Happy Meals and Trans fats make people thin? (1)

While a modern 'ban, legislate and micromanage' mentality about food has taken hold on the coasts of the US, obesity researchers in the middle, at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, contend handing over even more control of choice to social authoritarians won't work; we instead have to show people that just because you can eat a lot of junk food doesn't mean you should. And go for a walk once in a while.

Widespread food restrictions are a recent inexplicable modern cultural phenomenon, right up there with throwing parties to get more people to sign up for food stamps(2). The science reality is that each of us has an 'energy balance' where we don't gain or lose weight. Yes, it stinks that some people can eat rubbish and never gain weight but some people are tall and some people never go bald and some people are smarter than others too. We can't legislate those things (not even the super-smart people in Frisco or New York City can) but finding a "regulated zone", as the obesity researchers put it, where we eat less and exercise without engaging the body's natural defenses for preserving body weight, is possible.

One thing is clear.  It is a lot less work to stay healthy than it is to shed pounds after you are already obese.  What needs to change, they contend, is doing nothing. 

"What we are really talking about is changing the message from 'Eat Less, Move More" to 'Move More, Eat Smarter'," says James O. Hill, Ph.D., executive director of the Anschutz Health and Wellness Center and professor of pediatrics and medicine.

They say even a change in intake of 100 calories a day would prevent 90 percent of adult weight gain. That's basically an egg.  Or an apple. Unfortunately it is also 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise, a light beer or 1⁄3 cup of guacamole. It probably isn't an extra egg making people fat.

But increasing activity is important.  Otherwise your body has to continually adjust, the yo-yo of weight loss and gain, by biologically matching energy intake to low levels of energy expenditure. They also debunk the media-fueled notion that the "American diet" or even kookier concepts like High-Fructose Corn Syrup, are behind the spike in obesity.  Using 1971 to 2000 numbers, they calculated that modern lifestyles, which require much less physical activity, could have meant a 30 to 80 fold increase in weight gain during that period if not for the body's physiological ability to achieve an energy balance.

Mitigation and rationing won't work, just like crash dieting does not work.  Crash dieting leads to a physical starvation response and banning good food leads to a cultural one. Everyone knows that, except the social authoritarians who have declared a War On Choice.

Citation: James O. Hill, PhD; Holly R. Wyatt, MD, John C. Peters, PhD, 'Energy Balance and Obesity', Circulation, 2012;126:126-132 doi: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.111.087213

NOTES:

(1) And aren't we supposed to hate skinny people, because they foist off a negative body image on the rest of us?  A sociologist will have to figure that one out, I am baffled that the fattest nation on the planet insists we focus too much on being thin.

(2) When I was a kid, food stamps were a safety net. The government was not throwing parties to convince people to sign up.