I am one of those hateful people who can eat pretty much what he likes and never put on weight. Neither gym nor low fat foods appeal, and I have avoided both for many years. Yet, somehow, miraculously, I remain a svelte 11 stone.
I am, thus, singularly ill-qualified to write about obesity and its threat to our physical, emotional and financial health. Smug, self-satisfied and thin: you should take what I say with a (small) pinch of salt.
Obesity stories are now as common as fast-food “restaurants”. When it isn’t bird flu, climate change, carcinogenic pills, cheap drink, illegal drugs, yob culture, terrorism, bio-engineering, family breakdown or speed cameras that threaten to lay waste our fragile civilisation, it is food.
In August last year the Department of Health published a report predicting that a third of adults and a fifth of all children under 15 will be obese by 2010. In December, the British Medical Journal warned that rising levels of obesity could bankrupt the NHS if left unchecked. In September 2007, Sir Derek Wanless published a report that contained a similar warning, and a month later the government’s Foresight programme claimed that “by 2050… 60% of adult men, 50% of adult women and about 25% of all children under 16 could be obese.”
It was, however, another point made by the Foresight project that captured particular attention. “Obesity ‘not individuals’ fault'”, ran the BBC website headline.
“Individuals can no longer be held responsible for obesity,” the article’s first line explained, rather unfairly as it turned out. You didn’t need to read too far into the report’s executive summary, to encounter the statement, “Personal responsibility plays a crucial part in weight gain.”
The report, did, however, point out that “humans are predisposed to put on weight by their biology” and that our ability to resist that “predisposition” (the choice of word is crucial) “is being overwhelmed by the effects of today’s ‘obesogenic’ environment, with its abundance of energy dense food, motorised transport and sedentary lifestyles.”
That makes sense. When Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear technician imprisoned for revealing details of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme to a British newspaper in 1986, was placed in solitary confinement (for 11 years), he was offered any fast food he wanted, more on less on demand. His captors understood that this was an easy way of destroying their man: boredom begets hunger begets gluttony begets obesity begets ill-health begets (if you are lucky) coronary heart disease, stoke and perhaps even “natural death”.
Mr Vanunu refused the offer, however. And his refusal raises an uncomfortable question for us, a question that lies at the heart of almost all politics (not to mention a great deal of philosophy and theology): how far are human beings free, moral agents? How far can we overcome our “predispositions”? Or, put another way, how strong, how determinative are those predispositions?
One of the most portentous gifts of the Judaeo-Christian tradition to modern thought is that human beings are moral agents. If this seems unremarkable to us, we should recall that the opposite view has predominated (and still does) among many thinkers and societies. Humans have been puppets – of gods, stars, genes or socio-economic forces – rather more often than they have been puppeteers. Judaeo-Christianity is, in this respect at least, rather counter-cultural.
This is not to suggest that the Christian theology has itself always been clear on the issue. The balance between, on the one hand, the unlimited freedom that genuine moral agency apparently demands and, on the other, God’s sovereignty, is not an easy one to strike, and Christians have repeatedly erred towards the latter, usually in some form of predestination, erasing human agency in the process. For the most part, however, Christianity has understood humans to be capable of making decisions, for which they can be held responsible.
So are we simply whingeing about obesity then? Shouldn’t we simply stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, bin the Big Mac for a tofu and lentil salad, and scorn those unable to do likewise?
No. This is where we come to that all important word “predisposition”. According to the Foresight report, we are “predisposed to put on weight by [our] biology”. The argument goes something like this. For most of our evolutionary history, food was scarce and difficult to obtain. When we got it, we ate it quickly: we didn’t know where the next meal was coming from. The genes for such behaviour were selected and passed on, and remain with us today.
Such evolutionary accounts can be, indeed frequently are used as explanatory get-out-of-jail free cards, and can easily slide into caricatures of the “Captain Caveman in a Burger King” variety. Still, for what they are worth, they make sense, not least in helping us to understand why we do things, like overeat, which are clearly irrational, unpleasant and harmful.
Ironically, given the problems some Christians still have with evolutionary thinking, such a view is wholly consonant with the much-misunderstood doctrine of Original Sin. If we can get past the words and images that this much-maligned phrase conjures – “depravity”, “corruption”, unbaptised infants falling into hell, etc – we might understand that Original Sin, in the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam's descendants.” Human nature “has not been totally corrupted”. Rather, “it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin.”
This seems to me to be a good description of not only where we are but what the Foresight report claims. Of course, the story is narrated in theological and personal terms, rather biological and sociological ones, as is proper to a narrative that is theological and personal. Different narrative frameworks aside, however, the two stories cover the same ground. Each, to borrow the Catechism’s description of Original Sin, “provides lucid discernment of man’s situation and activity in the world.”
Crucially, however, the explanatory power of the Christian story extends beyond its analysis of the problem into two key areas. The first is that of structural sin, the idea that certain constitutions, organisations, laws, and policies, can themselves be sinful, because they embody and perpetuate the original or personal sin of those who founded and shaped them. It is here that we recognise elements of the ‘obesogenic’ environment discussed in the Foresight report: the urban landscape that deters children from taking exercise, the intergenerational family fragmentation that prevents cooking knowledge being passed down, the ubiquitous junk food advertising, the low wages that prevent some families from being able to eat well. Each of these is, at least in part, a structural sin: not simply the result of an individual’s personal sin, but also the accumulation and even institutionalisation of the errors, failings and sins of previous generations. None of these is necessary. Each can and should be addressed (not, note, “solved”) by the political process.
Even were such structural sins remedied, however, the problem would not be solved, a fact that leads us to the second area. Green, open, safe, car-free spaces; excellent home cooked food; a total absence of junk food advertising: none of this would prevent people from living like couch-potatoes or eating unhealthily. There is an unavoidable personal element in al this. To reverse the Foresight report (although without changing its essential argument): “The obesity epidemic cannot be prevented by a societal approach alone and demands individual action.”
We are left with the often unbearable weight of the fact of human moral agency, a weight that both evolutionary theory and policy documents are often uncomfortable with.
Christianity, of course, is not uncomfortable with it, although it has hardly been crystal clear about the nature of this moral agency, or, crucially, how far, even with the aid of the Holy Spirit, we can expect to be free of the “inclination to sin” than comes from our fallen nature. Depending on how gloomy or naïve you are, the answers range from “not at all” to “pretty much entirely”.
Whatever the precise answer is, one fact is not disputed: Christian theology understands being “in Christ” as liberation from the power of sin. And this points us towards an uncomfortable question.
Reinhold Niebuhr once said that the fall was the only empirically verifiable Christian doctrine. He was wrong. If those in Christ are indeed, “no longer… slaves to sin… but alive to God in Christ Jesus”, they should, in some small but noticeable way, be less likely to be ensnared by chains of original and personal sin. They should be less likely to be lead into temptations, such as those of our ‘obesogenic’ environment. And it means, presumably, that they would be likely to be obese.
Are they?
This article first appeared in 'The Difference Magazine.'
