Wetlook World Forum

In a world before high-yield factory farming, mass-marketed junk food, low-tech medical science, and celebrity icons, there was almost no need for diets because the average level of nutrition was barely enough to maintain good health. There has always been some portion of the population predisposed to carry excess weight and some portion of the population wealthy enough to be well-fed or even over-fed. If you put it on a chart, you'd likely get the classical bell curve with the obese at one end, the starving at the other, and a peak somewhere at or below a point we might label "adequately nourished". That curve was maintained by the severely over or under nourished in the population dying off before they can reproduce.

Since that time, the food production/distribution system has become vastly more efficient and economical, with the result that just about everyone can easily afford to gorge themselves to premature death due to some obesity-related cause. We are all inundated with conflicting marketing messages exhorting us to eat more and lose weight. We are also surrounded by style images telling us "thin is in". Medical science and a welfare state allows us to propagate into the next generation genes which might not represent the best of human kind. The result is a curve which is no longer bell-shaped. At best, it is becoming a more uniform distribution, and at worst, we are seeing two peaks - one at each end of the scale, with "ideal" or "healthy" becoming a minority.

Much of this is our own doing - buying/consuming according to wants or mere whims rather than actual needs - especially where food is concerned - without stopping to think of the health consequences. Sure, no single can of pop, chocolate bar, bag of chips or big mac is going to do us any harm, but consume them habitually and you've got a problem. Multiply that by millions of people and it shapes our culture and steers our economy. None of this is lost on marketers who delight in cultivating consumer cravings and habits around things we really don't need.