Opinion: Choosing health over corporate profits

January is a month when many of us promise we will try harder to become or stay healthy. We make New Year’s resolutions to eat better and lose weight. But by March or April, many of us feel deflated for not having enough willpower to maintain our commitment towards healthier eating.

Over the past few decades, the consumption of unhealthy, ultra-processed foods has grown and rates of obesity have soared. Is this due to a collective decline in willpower or is there some other force at play thwarting our sincere attempts to eat better? 

This year, to be successful in our quest for health, we must resolve to understanding and addressing the root causes of diet-related illnesses like hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and some cancers. 

For most of human history, we lived in a world where food was scarce, and malnutrition and starvation were a constant threat. But now we live in a word with an abundance of food, and yet still suffer from diseases related to food consumption. 

It is time to address the elephant in the room. Corporations and shareholder interests powerfully shape our foodscape. A few large multinational corporations dictate what we eat, how much we eat and even where we eat. 

The food industry engineers the taste of their products to appeal to our evolutionary preferences for salt, sugar and fat and invests in laboratories to create foods that are increasingly addictive and difficult to consume in small amounts. Fast-food restaurants proliferate in low-income neighbourhoods, where they know people have poor access to grocery stores, and have little time or money to prepare meals from fresh, healthy ingredients. 

Agricultural subsidies and the use of industrial farming practices results in more food being produced than is needed. For example, in the United States, approximately 4000 calories per person per day are produced when the average person only needs half this to meet daily energy needs. To maximize profits for shareholders, the food industry comes up with novel and enticing ways to increase calorie consumption. They ultra-process foods – adding chemicals and removing healthy nutrients – to “add value” and create higher profit margins on inexpensive food products like corn and soy.

Additionally, advertising of fast-foods and ultra processed food to children ensures that the food industry creates a taste for their products early in life and generates loyal lifelong consumers. Powerful lobbies and donations to political parties ensure that policymakers turn a blind eye to the health harms of many corporate practices.

Even corporations not related to the food industry frustrate our efforts at healthy living when they pay low-wages resulting in employees being unable to afford healthy foods like fresh fruits and vegetables, and by setting long or irregular work hours, so employees don’t have the time to shop and prepare healthy meals for themselves and their families.  What these corporations don’t realize is that they are reducing productivity by creating unhealthy, stressed employees at higher risk of illness or injury and lost time from work.

If we want our efforts to eat better or lose weight to pay off, we have to first recognize and then address these powerful corporate effects on our health. No country in the world has been able to reverse the trend in increasing obesity by focusing only on educating and encouraging individual behaviour change. These strategies can only work if the social and commercial environment in which we conduct our lives supports our efforts.

Governments need to regulate the food industry to protect their citizens, particularly children who are becoming increasingly obese through no fault of their own. Policymakers need to ban advertising of unhealthy foods to children. They need to tax sugar-sweetened beverages as several other countries in the world have done resulting in a corresponding decrease in consumption. Canadians desperately need healthy foods like fruits and vegetables to be subsidized so we can all afford them.

We have to remind our governments that we elected them to act in our best interests. It is the job of governments to protect people and empower them to live healthy and fulfilling lives. We need to ask all levels of government to do their job by standing up to corporations and reigning in their predatory practices. It will require courage, commitment and persistence on the part of lawmakers to take on corporations who will not give up their profits willingly. But governments cannot be idle while corporations ruin the health of Canadians. 

Vamini Selvanandan is a rural family physician and public health practitioner in Alberta. For more articles like this, visit www.engagedcitizen.ca.