Comments on: The Power of Word Choice: “Lifestyle” Diseases http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/the-power-of-word-choice-lifestyle-diseases/ Sat, 18 May 2013 14:35:30 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: dj http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/the-power-of-word-choice-lifestyle-diseases/#comment-23882 Sat, 23 Apr 2011 22:50:33 +0000 http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/?p=13636#comment-23882 I believe you’re wrong on this one. This is where the situationist/ social psychological perspective goes completely off base. It’s not a good comparison to make – comparing bad food choices by low SES Americans to poor Africans who can’t avoid malaria or guinea worm. ( i realize I’m reading between the lines here – you haven’t actually mentioned SES by name, but I’m assuming that’s what you mean when you said, ‘… they are trapped in communities where clean water and mosquito nets are in short supply.Could the same be said for many obese people in the United States who suffer from heart disease and diabetes?” If you’re not referring to poor communities in the US, then please correct me.)

As you mention, Mosquitos nets and clean drinking water are simply not available for many poor Africans, and they clearly can’t just pick up and move. I’m sure your heart is in the right place, but your argument does a real disservice to poor Africans, whose daily struggles far surpass what poor Americans experience.

I live in an urban area and can walk one block to the deli and buy myself a cucumber for .79, an apple for .60 and some cottage cheese, low fat, for about 2.29. This is a pretty filling meal and comes in under $4. Or I could walk one block in the other direction and spend about the same amount of money at McDonalds. This same choice is available to most anyone in the city in which I live.
By suggesting that personal choice isn’t the real problem, you’re failing to acknowledge all of those people, and many of them are poor, who are concerned with their health and don’t eat at McDonalds. How do they do it? How do they resist the lure of cheap, high fat junk food? They make a choice not to. I don’t know how much time you’ve spent with low SES folks, but they’re not all fat and they don’t all subsist exclusively on burgers and fries.

Social psychological arguments display their political stripes very openly and unabashedly in arguments like yours. Blame the obesity epidemic on society and encourage government to regulate fast food out of existence, then we’ll finally see a return to healthy eating, yeah? How about rather than regulate fast food out of existence, we start by acknowledging that there are those who do make healthy choices, figure out why they’re able to do so, and others aren’t, and try to create incentives that would motivate people to make different decisions? I think that’s a more productive place to start.

Personally, I detest fast food restaurants and everything they represent. And I’m in favor of pressuring them to provide healthier alternatives or list the nutritional content of their food items. But change isn’t going to come by regulating them out of existence. Their lobbying power is far too strong for that to work. We need to be focused on getting individuals to change their behavior, somehow incentivizing them to make better choices, rather than punishing those who choose wisely by blaming society.

http://www.neuropoly.com

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