The authors believe Eddy and Patsy, stars of Absolutely
Fabulous, are examples of the way the modern world can
affect our weight.

Photo by Lisamorgan, provided by Flickr.

In the 1990s Absolutely Fabulous hit our TV screens, presenting us with two women poles apart on the body image spectrum – thin, former model Patsy who claims not to have eaten since 1973, and Eddy, constantly dieting yet failing to lose her extra pounds.

Eddy’s conundrum will be familiar to many women unwilling to go to Patsy’s extremes. Despite Eddy trying myriad diets, her city lifestyle, car reliance and penchant for exclusive restaurant eating may be adding to her weight worries, and those of many men and women of the modern world. This is the view of two ANU academics who have published a book on the subject.

Dr Jane Dixon and Professor Dorothy Broom have edited The Seven Deadly Sins of Obesity, an examination of the environmental factors contributing to the increase in obesity around the world.

While Eddy’s weight problems could be attributed to her overindulgence and natural physique – her ex-husband quips, “She could eat air and put on weight” – some aspects of her life – like too many ‘experts’ confusing the public about health and weight, car reliance and city living - may be adding to her weight burden.

Broom and Dixon from the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health believe many people like Eddy, from different socio-economic groups, are more likely to struggle with excess weight for a variety of societal, political and economic reasons.

While the one-liners about weight, or lack thereof, had audiences rolling in the aisles, obesity is no joke. It’s the source of an increasing number of health issues and affecting many more of us than ever before.

Australians are getting fatter. This country now produces some of the highest numbers of obese youth in the world and the adults aren’t doing too well either. But is it all down to lack of willpower, or does the world in which we live contribute to the increasing bulges on our collective waistline?

The two academics argue it’s not just temptation we need to be led away from, but a number of environmental factors that are making it harder for people to keep obesity at bay.

Dixon and Broom highlight seven modern world ‘sins’ that add to the obesity problem. The book explores how aggressive marketing, time and parenting pressures and the obsession with economic growth all add to our life burden, and our weight burden.

The book does not absolve individuals like Eddy from personal responsibility for weight gain, but considers contributing factors that didn’t exist in our great-grandparents time that are leading us to a fatter existence.

“The idea of the ‘obesogenic environment’ been around for about 10 years, but this was a paradigm shift in understanding obesity and population,” Dixon says. “Our book is trying to tease out the particular elements of that environment which add to obesity problems.”

At the start of the 20th century people used trams, rode bicycles or walked everywhere. Food was dug up from the garden, cooked from scratch and eaten around a dinner table – not collected by car, from a supermarket, and heated rapidly in a microwave to be served in front of the television. All of these things, Broom and Dixon say, are hard to avoid and liable to add inches.

Another notable difference between past generations and those today is the impact socio-economic status has on weight. It used to be poor people who were thin, but now obesity emerges most commonly in low socio-economic groups. One reason for this is the ease of access to and the low price of energy dense foods, but there might also be elements of time stress and parenting pressure, according to the researchers.

“A solo parent with three children on a low income is concentrating on controlling the things she or he can control,” Broom says. “They are living day to day, so if they can make their kids happy by giving them a burger when they ask for it, why wouldn’t they do that?”

Another issue making it harder to be thin when you’re short of money is where people with lower socio-economic status live and work – usually in areas with limited public transport options and where the environment is less pleasant, has fewer parks and playgrounds and is less likely to be considered safe. This means parents don’t get out and walk, and are reluctant to let their children play outside.

Then there is the plethora of conflicting diet and exercise advice, now even more freely available on the Internet. The researchers point to the “proliferation of scientists, charismatic individuals and businesses dispensing conflicting advice about what constitutes a healthy diet and appropriate exercise”, before discussing how this cacophony of self-help can in fact be a major hindrance.

The authors also point out that this ‘marketplace’ of health and diet advice is least useful to the less educated and less wealthy in our society.

But the middle classes and their children aren’t always doing much better. Many of these parents, concerned about children’s safety, don’t allow their kids to walk or cycle to after-school activities so the spin-off benefits of travel-related exercise are lost. Also free play involving physical activity – like taking off for a long cycle ride with friends – a memory that many people who grew up as recently as the 1980s would be familiar with – may be disappearing.

Yet if positive change is to occur, say the researchers, it’s the educated middle classes who need to lead it. Historically, social acceptance of diet change has been led by educated women, as they are the ones who traditionally cook for their families and manage the family diet. An example of this was the shift away from mass butter consumption in the 1970s as a result of increased heart disease and the move to eat more chicken as opposed to fatty red meat.

“It takes an educated public to take leadership,” Dixon says.

But the solution will not be found in the latest fad diet, a phenomenon that the researchers dismiss as not useful. “Practically every woman alive has dieted, probably many times. If dieting worked there would be no fat women,” Broom says. But what she and her colleague advocate isn’t a national diet change, it’s a conversation about what’s making us fat and what’s making it hard to be thinner.

For Absolutely Fabulous’ Eddy, finding the magic bullet to weight loss was almost an obsession, despite her daughter asserting that eating a balanced diet and exercising are easy. Broom’s response is to agree that it should be that easy, but there is much in our world that makes it in fact very hard.

Burying our collective heads in the sand, like Eddy, solves nothing. “The more I love myself, the more I will be loved,” the character said. “The more I love myself, the more I will be loved. I will be thin and fabulous and live life every second to the fullest. This is not my fat. It has followed me from another existence. It is not the fat of now.”

So what’s the cure? Neither academic is waiting for the emergence of an anti-obesity pill that will reduce our diets or increase our metabolism as the answer to the problem.

“We are trying to understand what an obesogenic environment means in more specific terms,” Broom says.

“We are dealing with this from a societal level, as opposed to how can individuals be motivated to change their behaviour.”

“We don’t claim to have the solutions, but we hope our work can be part of a constructive discussion involving everyone concerned – policy makers, researchers, professionals and ordinary citizens. Ultimately we think that’s the way to arrive at realistic and effective solutions.”

The Seven Deadly Sins of Obesity:

• Consumption obsession
• Time pressure
• Parenting pressures
• Technology
• Car reliance
• Marketing of unhealthy food
• Confusing advice