This is the problem with weight-loss ‘solutions’

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Not only is it now easier to access ultra-processed foods than fresh foods, but we are being manipulated by increasingly sophisticated tactics.

Food companies spend billions of dollars each year advertising foods that confuse our bodies. The packaging is designed to dazzle us, while the flavours are created to activate a “bliss-point” in our mouths.

In his book, Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions, Michael Moss describes how something as simple and innocuous as pumpkin spice is traditionally made of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and sometimes ginger. “Not so in processed food,” he writes. “Its pumpkin spice is simulated through the deployment of as many as eighty elements.”

The amplified flavour hit is thought to trigger a spike in dopamine production, making ultra-processed foods highly addictive, despite not delivering the nutrients we need. So, our bodies remain “hungry” for the nourishment they require to be healthy, while our brain and palate remain hungry for another hit. This is why obesity is sometimes referred to as a paradoxical disease of malnutrition: our bodies might be consuming too much energy, but they are starved of what they actually need.

That’s before you consider that research has found if you match an ultra-processed diet and an unprocessed diet for calories and macronutrients (fat, carbohydrate, sugar, salt, protein and fibre), our bodies respond very differently.

Those on the unprocessed diet have higher levels of appetite suppressing hormones and lower levels of hunger hormones, while those on the ultra-processed diets experience the opposite: lower levels of appetite suppressing hormones and higher levels of hunger hormones.

When these foods are the most available – often the most affordable (let’s not forget that obesity disproportionately affects the poor; people who are so financially stressed they don’t have the option of anything but the cheapest food) – and we are being manipulated at biological and psychological levels, are we really to blame?

“In our current food environment its practically impossible for even motivated people to maintain the recommended diet,” says Alexandra Jones, a senior research fellow at the George Institute of Global Health. “We need to address the systemic drivers of unhealthy diets, rather than focusing on individual choices.”

Jones adds that a decade of voluntary policies to improve the food supply in Australia has “achieved lacklustre results”.

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“The 2022 State of the Food Supply report showed little improvement in reducing salt and saturated fat in packaged foods to meet voluntary Healthy Food Partnership targets, and also found the Health Star Rating label was still only on 41 per cent of products,” she says. “In their current self-regulatory format these initiatives are acting as a marketing tool for industry but are doing little to drive meaningful change in Australia’s diet.”

Jane Martin, executive manager of the Food for Health Alliance, agrees, adding that weight-loss treatments alone, without pulling the levers that are shaping the food environment and influencing behaviours is futile. We also need to provide support to people to make changes, not just tell them to do better.

“You need a package. And the individual focus is something that the industry has very much developed and fuelled. It plays into their hands because it takes the focus off them and their responsibility,” she says.

It’s easier to blame individual – and make them pay for it – on so many levels, than change a whole, highly profitable industry. And until the industry is made to take responsibility, “innovative” treatments will keep popping up; each one a reminder that our attention is being misdirected as we continue to play whack-a-mole with symptoms rather than addressing the true cause.

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