Ignorance Is Not Bliss

This recent comic strip makes me chuckle, but I have to disagree with Garfield.  How can I live my values if I don’t know what I’m doing?

Beautiful Souls

I enjoyed reading this N.Y. Times book review of Eyal Press’ Beautiful Souls: “Eyal Press looks at ordinary people who resisted the stats quo to follow their own convictions.”

Paul Grüninger, a Swiss police commander, had a simple explanation for why he broke the law to help Jewish refugees flee Austria in 1938. His daughter remembered that he would repeat the words “I could do nothing else.” It is a humble answer, as if to say that anyone would have done the same.

It’s the same answer I might give to someone who asks, “Why are you vegan?”

How could I be anything else?

A World in Denial of What it Knows

If you are interested in social issues, I bet that title is nothing new to you.  It’s the title of an opinion article in yesterday’s N.Y. Times (link).  The author expands on Donald Rumsfeld’s “known knowns, known unknowns,… and unknown unknowns” to suggest that there are also unknown knowns.

This happens when people ignore something that everybody should really know.  For instance, “What kind of willful obtusity ever suggested that subprime mortgages were a good idea?  An intelligent child would have known that there is no good time to lend money to people who obviously can never repay it.”  The author also mentions Bernie Madoff, whose figures were demonstrated to the S.E.C. nine years before the scandal to be “not merely incredible but mathematically impossible.”

I have been struggling to understand this phenomenon for years, only I have called it the line between ignorance and indifference.  If you have been paying any attention at all to environmental, social, or animal welfare issues, you have probably wondered about this yourself.  I have seen people accept facts and then refute the obvious conclusions.  I have pinned people down in debates to saying the most ridiculous things you can imagine, for instance that a subsistence farming family in South America is to blame for having their only water source, a nearby pond, polluted by foreign farming conglomerates clearing the rainforest for soybean production.  When I asked how this could possibly be their fault, the only thing I could get out of him was, “I can’t let them off so easy as you can.”  Huh?

I think people have worldviews, influenced by their culture (here’s my discussion of American values), prejudices, stereotypes, and habits.  They defend these close to their hearts even in the face of contradictory evidence, because to let them go is frightening.  For instance, the discussion about the South American family was really about bad things happening to good people; the person I was talking to refused to believe in that, I would say because it means ultimately we do not have the final say about what happens to us.  We can wear seat belts and go to church and stay inside when it snows and not use natural gas and still our house can burn to the ground.  This same person once told me that the family of the girl in California who was kidnapped from her bedroom several years ago deserved what happened because her window was not locked, only screened.  When I asked, “What about fresh air?” he said “That’s what air conditioning is for.”  Ridiculous statements to defend a belief based on fear.

Maybe when people refuse to believe that the earth is warming, that we are causing animal extinctions, that starving children and a continent ravaged by AIDS matters, or that suffering is suffering whether it’s a dog or a pig, they are afraid of what it would mean in their lives to accept these ideas.  It would mean changing their habits, for instance driving and eating, and opening up to compassion, even feeling a responsibility to do something.

These issues are a bummer, and sometimes they don’t have easy solutions, or easy solutions are outside what we are willing to consider.  So the defense is to deny them, at the expense of truth.

I don’t have all the answers.  I don’t have a Truth Hotline.  But I know a silly statement when I hear it, such as “It’s logical for me to eat factory farmed pork but get angry about puppy mills, because carrots have feelings, too.”  This is the point at which I suspect we have moved beyond ignorance, beyond indifference, and into the middle of denial, the known we willfully unknow.

The Echoes of Our Actions

A Friendly Farm Sanctuary Goat

It can be easy to get discouraged when we see the suffering in the world, the suffering of both people and animals, in every town across the globe.  We can feel as though the problem is too big, and too few people care.  Even good people we love seem oblivious  and unconcerned about the harm their actions cause.  We can’t see things improving, and change seems impossible.  What is the point of yet another petition or march, when the deck is so completely stacked against us?

I have a very small answer, and it begins with a “Hi.”  Every other day I run two miles along a route with many kids trudging to school, lately in the cold and dark.  As is my policy, I have been giving a cheery “good morning!” to all of them since September.  Beginning with no response, after a month or so a few would say “hi” back, and now in December almost all do, and some even smile!  It is not hard to imagine that someone who smiles and says hi on the way to school is at least .0001% more cheery when they arrive, and says something .0001% nicer to someone else.

I care deeply about the suffering of people, but because this blog is about food, and many vegans and vegetarians feel particularly isolated in their sorrow over animal suffering in the midst of a meat-eating frenzy, I’m going to narrow the rest of my examples.  My closest friend went vegetarian after about a year of discussions about why I switched from vegetarian to vegan.  It was an important part of my life, she cared about me and would ask how it was going for me.  It never in my wildest dreams occurred to me that she would become vegetarian – I was just telling her how I felt.  I never asked her if I had influenced her, since I didn’t want to imply she couldn’t think of it herself, but… probably at least a little, right?  My Dad started out angry at my becoming vegan; two years later, after many conversations, he told me he wanted to be one.  He tells me he often stands up for the vegan position in conversations with friends and family.   (Here’s another great example: The Power of One).  I can think of several friends who have cut back on meat or dairy since knowing me.  A lot of nice people ask me questions about being vegan; they are honestly confused about the issues, and tell me they appreciate my thoughtful, non-judgmental answers.  They don’t usually run home and throw away all their meat, but there’s at least a hairline crack in that wall, and they now know a vegan who doesn’t fit the awful stereotype.

It is not easy to keep saying “hi” to people who ignore you.  It is not easy to stand up for vegan values in an engaging way in the face of indifference or hostility.  It takes courage, it takes patience, and it takes faith, a faith in humanity.  Go ahead and march for farm animals, sign checks and petitions, write letters, hand out leaflets, speak to groups.  I do these things, too, but I bet my greatest influence is unintentional, just in the way I live my life, in the obvious peace I’ve found in letting go of eating animals.  I can stand up firmly for animals in public forums, but I think I shine brightest when I can offer gentler activism one-on-one through my peaceful action and speech.

Ultimately I have to accept that I can’t control other people, or fix the world, and I still have to leave space for compassion for those who are suffering now, but I don’t let it discourage me.  I do see improvement on the larger stage as well.  Many states have recently passed laws improving conditions for farm animals.  Celebrate these victories!  Celebrate even getting this issue onto a ballot.  And celebrate the effects your smaller actions can have, even if they seem to diminish into the darkness.  Keep listening for those echoes, and I think you’ll hear them.

The Long Day

I shared a fortune cookie with my mom tonight.  She’s had Alzheimer’s for twelve years now.  There weren’t enough cookies for everyone, and so as I opened it, I said Here’s a challenge, fortune cookie gods: Make this a fortune for two very different people.

Our fortune read, “Even the longest of days will come to an end.”

Well done.  We split that cookie, she and I.

“The less able a group is to stand up and organize against oppression, the more easily it is oppressed.” – Peter Singer, on specesism

More thoughts on oppression of various groups.

“There can be no reason – except for the selfish desire to preserve the privileges of the exploiting group – for refusing to extend the basic principle of equality of consideration to members of other species.” – Peter Singer

Fortune Cookie Wisdom

Chocolate Crinkles

We ordered Chinese food tonight, but we made Chocolate Crinkles for after.

We opened our fortune cookies, and two of them are making my brain hurt:

Your fate is in no one else but you, no other hands but yours.

and

Your luck has been completely changed today.

Ow, ow, ow!

Obesity: How about Supporting Personal Responsibilty?

I just watched the 18th lecture in the Yale Psych 123 class I’m auditing, “The Psychology, Biology, and Politics of Food.”  This lecture was about conflicting ways of thinking about the obesity issue, and I found his approach to a messy topic to be very organized and well-considered, so I thought I’d sum it up here.

He begins by posing the rhetorical question, Should government play a role, and if so, what should be done?

He asked the class what was a threshold for government action – what would or did convince us that government should get involved in what was often viewed as a personal issue?   I thought about it and decided there were two reasons I thought the government should be involved: First, it is already involved through farm subsidies, such that people are faced with a regressively unfair food environment – government needs to undo this or at a minimum patch together supports for healthier eating to balance the situation.  Secondly, we’ve been playing the personal responsibility card for decades and the problem is getting worse.

One student answered his question as I did, that government is involved, and Professor Brownell pointed out that it is involved in more than subsidies, and many of these programs encourage unhealthy diets:

• USDA nutrition guidelines
• FDA and food labeling
• WIC, Food stamps, etc
• National School Lunch Program

Brownell next talked about the two main competing frames (points of view, ways of talking about obesity) which define the issues, and had this great chart:

Issue	Corporate/Government	Public Health / Non-Gov’t Org.
Cause?	Personal misbehavior	Environment
Who is afflicted?	Those at fault	Those in need
Impact?	Costs others $	Suffering
What should change?	Individual	Social drivers
Default priority?	Treatment	Systemic change
Main approach?	Education	Prevention

He then discusses the American view of Personal Responsibility, which is not a worldwide view.  He says personal responsibility can be debated as matters of morality and life philosophy (is what we’re asking of people moral and just?), science (e.g. food deserts, or biology working against us – asking if what we expect of people is defended by research), and pragmatism (how is that working so far, or what would be the impact of what we ask of people?).  He goes into details for each:

American morality/philosophy is a convergence of the Protestant/Puritan work ethic, a “just world” bias, and American values.  He teases those apart:

The Protestant/Puritan work ethic says:

• hard work and determination = success
• self-determination is the key to happiness
• hard work and success are moral imperatives
• pull yourself up by your bootstraps

Basically, if you’re not succeeding, there’s something wrong with you.  Can you see how this ethic would affect our views of the obese?  Is it just?

The “just world” bias is when people believe:

• Good and bad things happen for just reasons, so…
• …people get what they deserve.
• …people deserve what they get.
• …bad conditions (diabetes or poverty) are deserved.
• …only bad people deserve bad conditions.

If you believe in the first statement, the rest of the conclusions follow.  When it’s written out like this, they look indefensible, but this bias is a common psychological phenomenon.  If you don’t see how wrong it is, click on the above link to read about some experiments that should convince you, or consider little kids with cancer.  Related to “just world” is the “fundamental attribution” error: when bad things happen to us we blame conditions (I was tired, bad luck, bad situation) but when bad things happen to other people we blame them.

The above ethics and errors translate into American values:

1. Freedom is coupled with personal responsibility.
2. Individuals determine what happens to them.
3. People must prevail over poor conditions.
4. Everyone can succeed.
5. Lack of success = personal failure.
6. Only defective people fail.

Can you recognize these statements as typical American views?  Are they fair?

Next he talked about the second way of discussing personal responsibility, using science.  Some examples for the obesity discussion would be:

1. influence of biology (animal and genetics studies)
2. world change in diet (do the trends suggest personal responsibility or environment?)
3. migration studies (what happens when people move from one environment to another?)

Then he discussed the third way of approaching the personal responsibility argument, pragmatism, saying personal responsibility has been the default since the 1960′s.  Has it been effective?  Does it lead anywhere constructive?

Professor Brownell then suggests a way to reconcile those two frames, environment vs. personal responsibility.  Most people would agree that poor diet is a personal issue, but for some time it has also been recognized as a medical issue.  People are starting to see it also as a public health issue, and some people include social, economic, and political factors.  The key is that those who accept all the factors still understand that personal responsibility is important, too.

This next point he said was the most important point of the whole class.  He showed a diagram which presented the old way of approaching obesity: educate and implore people to eat better, in the hopes they will have a better diet.  This has not worked.  Our diets are worse.  He suggests a better way, backing upstream and using economics, legislation, an improved environment and regulation to affect optimal defaults, and those optimal defaults would then encourage individuals to choose a better diet.

He discusses a new understanding of “food safety” which includes not just the sanitation, contamination and toxins, for instance, that we usually think of causing immediate diseases, but also factors that cause long-term disease.  Is a food “safe” if it kills us in 20 years instead of 20 minutes?

His proposed new view of the obesity issue is:

1. Personal responsibility is critically important.
2. What undermines it?
3. How can we enhance it?

The “blame the environment” camp is often framed as wanting to curtail Americans’ freedoms, the freedoms to eat what we want, in the quantity we want, as often as we want: people like Professor Brownell want to infringe on your right to eat deadly trans-fats.  But the issue can also be framed with other freedoms in mind, freedoms that support personal responsibility:

• the freedom to be informed (e.g. restaurant labels)
• the freedom to have safe food (e.g. trans fats)
• the freedom to be free of commercial exploitation in schools

Supporting personal responsibility.  An idea to think about.

No Wonder We’re Obese – A new way of thinking about the epidemic

Up until about two weeks ago, I would say that I had the same idea about obesity that most people, including obese people themselves, have.  You’ve heard of the ELFS diet?  “Eat Less Food, Stupid!”  It’s offensive, but I think it about sums up what most people think is the problem: obesity is a personal failure to control oneself.

But in the last two weeks, I have thrown myself into a Psychology course Yale offers free online, and I have been immersed in a new way of thinking about obesity and overweight in general.

I have listened to scientists talking about the animal studies they have conducted indicating that high-fat or high-sugar foods are addicting in a way very similar to cocaine, alcohol and nicotine.  Animals eat normally when exposed to healthy foods but overeat when they are allowed to eat fat and sugar.  Rats exposed to sugar develop tolerance to it which makes them need more of it to get the same dopamine reaction.  Rats will choose sugar over cocaine or alcohol.  Fat and sugar cause changes in the brain scans of obese humans that are indistinguishable from the changes that cocaine cause.  This addiction, like that of other drugs, appears to prime the victim to lifelong cravings for the substance.  There are opioid-blocking drugs, usually used for alcoholics, that work to treat binge eaters [Contrave is a combination of several of them].  As with other addictive substances, habitual ingestion of sugar causes the body to prepare for it when cues are received (sight, smell causes insulin increases, etc.).  When people experience these cues without taking the expected cocaine, alcohol, nicotine, or sugar, they experience strong cravings because their bodies are prepped.  People and animals both need more of the sugar and fat over time to maintain the same levels of dopamine in their brains.  Patients with overeating problems use the language of addiction, “craving,” “loss of control,” and experience visible and measurable withdrawal symptoms, such as change in body temperature.   People continue to overeat despite clear negative consequences physically, socially, and healthwise.  It is not clear whether it is only sugar which is addictive, or whether it could be fat, chemical additives, or other ingredients such as High Fructose Corn Syrup.  All these professionals say that more studies are needed before any of these ingredients are labeled addictive substances, but as you can see, they are well on the way.

If alcohol or cocaine were available everywhere, dumped into school lunches and products aimed at children, advertised all day, and pushed on people constantly, through office candy bowls and birthday celebrations, school parties, miles of fast food joints, and shelves of junk in gas stations and pharmacies, would we be surprised that people had a problem resisting it? Nicotine was once advertised to children, loaded into vending machines, and sold for a quarter a pack, and no one thought anything of it.  When we learned how addictive it was, we put a stop to it.  If it turns out that sugar is addictive, as it appears to be, what ramifications will that have?

I have learned that sugar is jammed into things it has no business in, such as peanut butter, Dinty Moore Beef Stew, and ketchup.  Why?  Because it tastes good and increases sales.  It reminds me of the way Coca-Cola got its start; now it just relies on a HFCS high.

Our bodies’ biology evolved in a world of scarcity, and that biology fights us in a world of overabundance.  We developed very strong tastes for sugar and fat, the hard-to-come-by energy-dense foods that would help us survive through the lean times.  Our bodies are designed to store this energy as body fat, and to conserve it in lean times.  Our bodies don’t care that we are trying the newest diet – it thinks we are facing starvation, and cuts our metabolism and increases our desire for food.

We are often under stress, and stress leads to unhealthful eating.  In the Yerkes primate study, subordinate monkeys (who experience more stress) ate a little less of a healthy diet than dominant monkeys, but when sugar and fat were introduced, dominants ate a bit more but subordinates ate a lot more, especially at night.  The fat and sugar was a comfort to them, an efficient dopamine-stimulating coping strategy.

How about genes?  It is estimated, using twin studies, that 25-40% of population weight variance is due to genetics.  Adopted children’s weights show a strong correlation to their biological parents’ weights, and little to their adopted parents’ weights.

“Genetic influences largely determine whether a person can become obese, but it is the environment that determines whether a person does become obese and the extent of that obesity.” – Stunkard & Meyer 1993

“Genes load the gun and the environment pulls the trigger.” – Bray 1988

You know how some people can eat and eat and never gain a pound?  I’m not totally like that, but I have to admit, I have never had a problem with weight.  But people with the obesity genes would have had great advantages thousands of years ago.  They would have been the ones who could starve and starve and never lose a pound.  That’s what they’re up against when they try to diet.

An economist pointed out that once upon a time work was hard work.  People toiled and sweated.  Some still do that, but many perform more sedentary labor, which means that instead of being paid to spend calories, it has become more expensive, primarily in lost leisure time.  Everyone is busy, but it doesn’t take too much imagination to consider a hard life of stand-in-one-place retail work sandwiched with a bus ride home and caring for children in a difficult neighborhood which does not give an opportunity for an hour of jogging.  This probably isn’t an uncommon situation, and can you blame them for not getting enough exercise?

Whose failure is it that our government’s farm bill subsidizes exactly the crops that go into the worst foods?  Corn and soy are converted into animal flesh and most of the unidentifiable chemicals that populate processed food ingredient lists.  The resulting artificial cheapness of  these foods explains why they are so profitable, so heavily advertised, and so prevalent.  How many times have you wondered why vegetables are so expensive?  It’s the other way around – American spend less per capita on food than any other nation.  Vegetables, even organic ones, probably are a truer reflection of the actual cost of food, and they don’t seem expensive until you compare them with our dirt-cheap processed food and 99 cent menu items.  Our laws encourage consumption of food that will make people sick.  The Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine makes the connection between this issue and our hair-tearing about the high costs of medical care:

“Even if the steak and cheese produced on American farms foster health problems, our government rallies behind agribusiness all the way to the emergency room.  Sadly, every administration in recent decades has been caught up in a system that not only tolerates ill health, but encourages it.” – Barnard

"A good source of 7 vitamins and minerals"

Food manufacturers have most of us outsmarted.  They deliberately tweak their marketing and the product itself to trick us into eating more than we think we are.  They sneak in unhealthy fat and sugar, they cause us to increase our portion sizes by making the product more nonuniform (studies show people will eat more of a snack mix than a homogeneous snack such as plain pretzels), they put health claims on packages that are usually inversely related to the healthfulness of the product within (compare health claims on packages of Cocoa Puffs “now with Whole Grains” to a package of carrots), they trumpet the vitamins they added to Pop-Tarts, for Pete’s sake.  Vitamin deficiencies are not really a problem for most Americans – Pop-Tarts are the problem!  Restaurants know that we think a good deal is more food for the same price, and so we come back to establishments that load up our plates, so now they all do, and it is now very difficult to have restraint when we eat out – our whole sense of how much is reasonable to eat has been sideswiped.  Industries study us and tweak their approach to push our buttons.  We don’t stand a chance.

Diets don’t work.  How many obese people do you know who followed a diet, took off weight, and kept it off for five years?  When diet promoters give statistics of success for their products, they tout how fast the weight comes off and usually use a six-month standard, but that isn’t good enough.  Here is a study that followed several diet and exercise combinations for two years, and at the end of that period there was little net weight loss and two of the three groups ended up heavier.  The best-rated diet, Weight Watchers, repeatedly says you will keep weight off “if you stick to it.”  That’s the whole point.  People with with a chronic addiction to unhealthy foods, immersed in a toxic environment of cheap, tasty, ubiquitous, artificial foodlike substances, are unlikely to be able to resist for long.

Click to zoom in on this amazing picture.

Look at the food in the grocery store.  If you did an item-by-item analysis, I think you would find that the vast majority of it is crud that no one should be eating.  What are the percentages of white pasta to whole wheat?  How about for bread products?  What is the proportion of truly healthful cereals to the rest?  How many of those peanut butters and jellies are the best they could be?  How many aisles are dedicated to snacks and sodas? Compare the number of bags of white flour to whole wheat.  White rice to brown.  Juices with sugar to juices without.  There’s a little tiny shelf dedicated to dry beans, and an entire aisle of freezers dedicated to processed meals, fried whatever, and desserts.  Half an aisle honors ice cream.  There is more space dedicated to candy than to canned vegetables.  Remember the food pyramid?  How is all that candy going to cram into that teeny tiny little triangle at the top??

I was talking about this toxic environment with my Dad and he said he wondered why he overate the stuff he bought, and then started wondering why he bought what he did at all, and the answer was, it was there.  He would wander down an aisle and, oh, that looks good, and here it is in the store, people must eat this, so why shouldn’t I?

Now, you can very reasonably counter that the stuff is there in those proportions because that’s what people demand.  That may take the blame off the store, but how does it help the person who’s trying to lose weight?  Having one person go on a diet in the midst of this feeding frenzy is like putting one of your fingers on a diet.  How can we blame individuals for this collective and often state-sponsored mess?

Yes, people can make better choices, but the deck is vastly stacked against us: a biology designed for scarcity, a food economy which separates food as a commercial commodity from food as nutrition and encourages consumption of unhealthy foods, nutrition education that is designed not by health advocates but by industry interests, and food manufacturers whose object is to manipulate us into eating more and more of food that’s worse and worse for us.

In these studies, in the articles I have read, the doctors, lawyers, economists, psychologists,and researchers I have heard speak in their own words, I have found a new compassion for and understanding of the problem of obesity, which may even surpass what obese people feel about themselves.  They think it’s all their fault, too.

One thing that all these professionals seem to have in common is that they do not know what to do about the problem.  The answer doesn’t seem to be diets, litigation (suing manufacturers), or even education.  How well has blaming or shaming the obese worked?  Maybe we should abandon that tactic.  A vaccine was mentioned as a possibility, something I would have scoffed at two weeks ago as a pharmacological solution for a lifestyle problem.  Now I’m not so sure.  Prevention of this chronic disease was discussed, particularly in light of all the marketing towards children.  Sugar taxes are unpopular with the public because they don’t want anyone telling them what to eat.  If you think there aren’t people all day telling you what to eat, through ads, your tax dollars, the USDA in your child’s classroom, and on and on, you haven’t been paying attention.  Wouldn’t you prefer it to be someone who cares about your health?

I’m coming to the conclusion that a huge part of the problem is the farm bill, a result of our senate system being skewed for more representation for less populated (farming) states.  I’m not opposed to farmers and I have no informed opinion on farm subsidies in general, but it doesn’t seem to make much sense to subsidize unhealthy food and then wonder why our health is so poor.  But no one can be sure.  Some of those professionals I heard felt that a variety of societal approaches should be tried to determine what works, and this is happening now, but in a haphazard, segmented way.   One suggestion was that a governmental department for food health be created, basically breaking that task away from the catastrophically conflicted USDA, which is primarily charged with promoting agriculture.  There’s no H or N for health or nutrition in “USDA.”

I’ve tried to present here an overview of thinking about obesity in a new way.  If this topic interests you, I would urge you to find out more through the Yale course linked above and through the Yale Rudd Center.