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By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #116: Overcoming obesogenic environments

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This week's "food for thought" excerpt comes from Fat Nation: A History of Obesity in America (2018), by Jonathan Engel.

"Our obesogenic environment depletes our willpower constantly by forcing us to expend energy resisting tasty food. One of the most successful strategies to staying thin relies not so much on resisting temptation but rather on removing it. Thin people like cookies and ice cream, too, but they are less likely to allow these products into their homes, offices, and schools, and thus they do not expend energy resisting them. Similarly, removing fast-food restaurants, candy machines, convenience stores, and donut shops from our environment does not mean that we never indulge, but rather that on a daily basis, we expend less mental energy thinking about not indulging. We achieve similar effects by removing coffee-and-cookie platters and candy bowls from our offices, as well as the ubiquitous leftovers placed in conference rooms after every corporate lunch."