Keeping your calorie intake and calorie expenditure balanced is considered to be a matter of self-discipline.
People who gain weight are assumed to lack personal responsibility… that obesity is just a matter of gluttony and sloth.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
In the video above, three experts from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) explain what they believe is the true cause of obesity.
Weight Gain and Behavior – Who is to Blame?
If weight gain / loss is driven by behavior, then we have to ask ourselves: what causes the behavior?
Everything we do, all our emotions and primal drives, are governed by hormones and neurons in the brain.
Whenever we make a decision to do something, such as eat a donut or go to sleep, it has a physiological and biochemical basis.
One of the biggest mistakes is to assume that all calories are the same and that weight gain is a simple matter of eating too much, exercising too little.
The fact is that some foods change our hormones and change our behavior.
Junk foods affect hormones like insulin, leptin and dopamine in a way that causes abiochemical drive in our brains. This alters our behavior towards eating more, exercising less and eventually becoming sick.
When You Become Addicted, you LOSE Your Freedom of Choice
What some people don’t realize, is that junk foods are addictive.
When you become addicted to something, you LOSE your freedom of choice.
Children are exposed to these addictive foods when they are very young. Some of them grow up obese and addicted to junk foods.
For someone who is addicted, reversing it is not a simple matter of making a decision and exerting discipline. Overcoming an addiction can be extremely difficult and some people never succeed, no matter how hard they try.
Big Food is The New Big Tobacco
The junk food companies, if anything, are WORSE than the tobacco companies ever were.
Their most aggressive marketing is towards children, who are turned into addicts at a young age and end up obese and diabetic.
In my opinion, children should be protected from these addictive foods in the same way as they are protected from drugs, alcohol and smoking.
This is where government needs to step in. I can see the arguments against government intervention, there are many of them and some of them are valid.
However, I think the arguments for the well-being of children and protecting them from manipulation by greedy people is so much more important.
Original Article by: AuthorityNutrition
