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Created: April 1, 2003
Latest Update: April 1, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

It's Hard to Resist Fast Foods and Oprah

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, April 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

On Monday, April 28, 2003, Deidre Collins wrote:

Subject:Obesity

Hey Jeanne,

A couple of weeks ago I was watching the Oprah show and the subject was on obesity. The show did a survey overseas about how foreign people view Americans as far as weight goes. Most of the people's responses were that Americans were fat. One woman overseas said that fifty percent of Americans were overweight, but in actuality, it's more than sixty percent of Americans who are overweight. Oprah's show, over many years, has brought much needed media attention to Obesity. More than likely because of Oprah's own personal weight struggles. Nevertheless, most of society is overweight and the structure of society does play a major role in a person's eating habits. Oprah's personal trainer on that show classified people into three different groups of overweight people. One is those who are severely obese, two are those with medical conditions that cause them to be overweight, and three was the emotional eaters. Not suprisingly, most people are in the emotional eating category. Americans eat when their happy, they eat when their sad and most of the time they are eating very fatty foods. People know what foods are healthy for them and what foods aren't but society doesn't make it easy for them to make a healthy choice. All of the fast food restuarants offer one dollar menues with greasy and fatty foods. People can't resist. As you said, people are too busy and don't have time to exercise everyday because of the way society is structured. You have to work, or maybe go to school or even both, and sometimes on top of that you may have a family. And since society is structured in terms of efficiency, people kind of have no choice. People do things in the fastest, cheapest, easiest manner there is. Unfortunately, the only ones who are capitalizing on this misfortune are the corporations like McDonalds.

On Monday, april 28, 2003, jeanne responded:

Deidre, I'm sorry to disagree with Oprah's trainer, but his typology doesn't cut it. Some people do eat for emotional reasons. They eat comfort food. But others eat to relieve stress; because they haven't the time to stop for other food; because they are exhausted from eating non-nutritious foods; because there are social pressures to eat fattening fast foods; because they are bored at being forced to stay in one place with no activity while they work. You need to look at Obesity and Structural Context.

I think it might be a good idea to look at Activity Sheet for Culture and Obesity.

Then let me know that yuou understand the complexity. One of the problems with getting your information from Oprah is that she isn't teaching an advanced college class.

See you soon. jeanne