Correlation, causation, snack-cakes

Apropos to all this foodie business...

I recently read this article in The Atlantic about the rise of obesity in America. This is how it starts:

In 1948, Congress doled out $5 billion to Europe in the first installment of the Marshall Plan, the World Health Organization was born, a simian astronaut named Albert I was launched into the atmosphere (he died), and doctors in Framingham, Massachusetts, an American everytown that once was a seat of the abolitionist movement, began a pioneering study of cardiovascular disease. Its initial results helped persuade the American Heart Association, in 1960, to push Americans to smoke fewer cigarettes and, a year later, to cut down on cholesterol. Today, thanks to a long-running public-health campaign, Americans have lower blood pressure and cholesterol, they smoke less, and fewer die from cardiovascular disease. In fact, from 1980 to 2000, the rate of deaths from cardiovascular disease fell by at least half in most developed countries.

Would that we had had similar success battling obesity.

The article goes on to tell the familiar story of the alarming increase in overweight Americans, from 45% of the total population in 1960 to 68% in 2008. It lays out the various problems in determining why the so-called obesity epidemic is happening and possible methods of curbing it. But what struck me was that opening paragraph. Read that passage again, skimming for content and making a few obvious extrapolations: in the 40s and 50s, Americans are smoking like chimneys... in the 60s, people finally wise up to lung cancer and start to cut down on smoking... around that time, they also start getting chubbier.... Today, Americans are probably the most stringent non-smokers of all the developed Western nations. We're also the fattest. Um. Wait.

I've seen scores of articles on obesity that compare today's food industry to the tobacco industry of yore -- manipulating consumers through advertising, tinkering with the addictive properties of their products, shadily shilling to kids and minorities. But nowhere have I seen anyone discuss the very glaring fact that heavy smoking drastically curtails appetite, both physiologically and physically, giving people less time to snack. Could it be that all this talk of increased sedentary lifestyles, overgrown portions, high fructose corn syrup, etc., are all missing the point? Could it be that, since the coming of modernity, we denizens of the developed, industrialized world are simply bored and looking for a quick, relatively cheap drug to keep us riding a dopamine high, and various mass-producing industries are happy to feed that need? Could it be that nicotine once did the trick, and now it's soda and family-sized Cheetos bags? Everyone loves to cite the "French paradox" as some amazing mystery of modern dieting. How is it that a society priding itself on staples like cheese, baguettes, and macarons can have the slimmest women in all of Europe? Is it because they have a happier, healthier, granola-crunchier relationship to their food? All signs point to not really. But, they sure do smoke a lot!

Anyway, I don't think I'm saying anything super revelatory, but it's strange that there hasn't been more publicized discussion of this. Given that recent efforts to cut down on smoking in various puff-happy parts of the world -- for instance, Japan -- have coincided with sudden mysterious spikes in obesity levels in those countries, speculation invites itself. What if, rather than plastering restaurants with calorie counts or encouraging unrealistic levels of athleticism in the general population, the solution to this "epidemic" can only come with the invention of a new drug, addictive and short-term euphoric but not detrimental to health? A real-life soma, perhaps? Scoff at the dystopian element if you will, but mark my words...