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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Johann Hari
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July 31 - August 5, 2024
Novo Nordisk—the Danish corporation that manufactures one of these drugs, Ozempic—has in one fell swoop become the most valuable company in Europe.
We built a food system that poisons us—and then, to keep us away from the avalanche of bad food, we decided to inject ourselves with a different potential poison, one that puts us off all food.
You laugh in order to survive. You joke to endure.
I believe you can both oppose the vile stigma that is directed at overweight people, and also explain—with love and compassion—the scientific evidence about obesity and why we need solutions to it.
If you pump food full of sugar and fat, it reduces bacterial growth, and if you add salt, it lasts longer on the shelf without rotting. So our food is filled with unheard-of amounts of all three.
These industrial processes often leave the food tasting metallic or bitter, so they then need to be pumped full of “6,000 food additives—flavorings, glazing agents, improvers, anti-caking agents, solvents, preservatives, colorings, acids, emulsifiers, releasing agents, antioxidants, thickeners, bleaching agents, sweeteners, chelators.”
Ronald McDonald is the second most recognized figure in the world, beaten only by Santa Claus. More people recognize the Golden M as the symbol for McDonald’s than the number of people who recognize the cross as a symbol of Christianity.
The first way that ultra-processed food undermines our satiety is strangely simple. You chew it less.
The second way our satiety is being undermined is that these manufactured foods often contain that uniquely powerful combination of sugar, fat, and carbs—and this seems to activate something primal in us.
There is, so far as he can ascertain, likely only one foodstuff in nature “where you have carbs and fat naturally mixed together as a unit”—and it’s breast milk. This is the first food almost all of us consume. It soothes us. As a species, humans didn’t access this seemingly unique sugar-fat combo after we’ve been weaned—until now. So we lap at it like an infant at the breast, and gorge.
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The third way is that processed food seems to affect your energy levels differently.
The fourth way is that processed food lacks two things we really need—protein and fiber.
The fifth way is that a lot of the drinks we now consume contain chemicals that may be actively triggering us to be more hungry.
The sixth factor is one that took me a while to really understand. This new kind of food has done something unprecedented: it has separated flavor from the underlying quality of our food.
The seventh factor is that these foods seem to cause your gut to malfunction, in ways that undermine satiety.
We have for forty years been consuming food that systematically undermines our satiety. Now, in response, we are demanding to be given drugs that give us back that lost sense of satiety.
An obese man is six times more likely to develop diabetes than a non-obese man, and an obese woman is twelve times more likely.
After learning all this, it was clear to me that we need to think about these drugs very differently from the oversimplified story that has been offered to us up to now. When you take them, you are not just changing your gut. You are changing your brain. You are changing your mind.
In our evolution and deep in our psyches, “the relationship between food and pleasure is fundamental.” Taking that away is hugely risky, he believes.
On the night Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, as the news of each state going into the red column came in, food orders on apps like Grubhub and Uber Eats in blue states massively surged, and people mostly ordered high-fat, high-carb junk.
how our parents read our signals of hunger and respond to them shape us deeply, and can play a significant role in our later weights. Based on this growing body of evidence, more and more experts now recommend teaching “responsive parenting” to all mothers and fathers.
Roughly one in ten of the people who have bariatric surgery develop an addiction to alcohol, or gambling, or shopping, or drugs, in the aftermath. They are often referred to as “addiction transfers”—where
The existence of outliers doesn’t disprove statistical risks.
We certainly want self-acceptance. But isn’t there a difference between self-acceptance and accepting the effects of a predatory food industry that’s poisoned us?
When somebody talks about the risks of obesity, what many people hear is: You’re threatening to take away the thing that makes me safe.
We have two tasks ahead of us—to learn to love our bodies however they are, and to learn to make our bodies as healthy and functional as we can. There is no contradiction between the two, because both are forms of self-love.
Western cooking, he said, is primarily about “adding.” To make a food tasty, you add butter, lemon, herbs, sauces. “But the Japanese style is totally the opposite.” It’s “a minus cuisine.” This cooking is about drawing out the innate flavor, “not to add anything extra.” The whole point is to try “to make as much as possible of the ingredients’ natural taste.” To them, less is more.
In Japan, you are taught from a very early age to only eat until you feel you are 80 percent full. Eating until you are totally full is regarded as bad for you. It takes time for your body to sense you’ve had enough, and if you hit a sense of fullness when you are still eating, then you’ve definitely had too much.
the Metabo Law has—along with Japan’s other measures—achieved its goal. Since it was introduced, obesity is declining in Japan once again, and is at the lowest level in the developed world.
The average American and British person is in poor health for between sixteen and nineteen years before they die. In Japan, it’s five to six years.
one in seven British women and one in eight American women get breast cancer, in Japan, it’s just one in thirty-eight.
you get your health right, if you learn how to eat, if you defeat obesity, if your knees and heart and pancreas are not ruined, then you can have more life, and more health.
Junk food, processed food, and the obesity they produce kill 112,000 Americans a year at least.
My first conviction is that we need to radically change the kind of food we are given from an early age, so the next generation doesn’t become hooked on shitty, satiety-sapping foods and they don’t feel the need to drug themselves to escape them.
Today, 67 percent of the food calories consumed by kids in the US come from ultra-processed foods.
An internal memo was released in 1998 from a company that makes a lot of the cookies you’ve probably eaten. They wrote that they had spoken with the most famous names in the fast-food industry, to figure out the best way to market to kids. They concluded: “It is important to note that since taste preferences are determined early, a great deal of effort focuses [on those] even younger than ten.”
So there’s a risk that these drugs are a real lifesaver, but they are restricted to a small elite, while the rest of the population will continue to become increasingly obese and die sooner than they had to. The Real Housewives of New Jersey will get to be thin, while the real schoolkids of New Jersey will develop diabetes at twelve.
How did we end up with a food system so dysfunctional that we need to engage in a program of mass drugging to protect us from it?
In the US Healthy Schools Campaign: https://healthyschoolscampaign.org/issues/school-food/ School Food Matters: https://www.schoolfoodmatters.org/ The Food Research and Action Center: https://frac.org/healthy-school-meals-for-all Food and Water Watch: https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/who-we-are/ Black Urban Growers: www.blackurbangrowers.com [inactive]
I recommend Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken, Swallow This by Joanna Blythman, Food for Life by Tim Spector, Ravenous by Henry Dimbleby, and In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan.
