I don’t know about you, but I pay attention to someone else’s shopping cart when I’m in line. A fat woman with snacks in her cart is almost always ahead. Either Providence plotted to almost always put a fat woman with snacks in front of me in the checkout line, or such characters have a high statistical frequency, so that it is enough to enter the checkout line to have one ahead. I’m with this last hypothesis. I also note that the fact that the person in front is almost always a woman is an indication that the traditional role of taking care of the house still falls to the female sex, despite the massive entry of women into the labor market and the increase in the number of singles.
What led me to snoop around in someone else’s cart was precisely the intriguing frequency of fat women who didn’t look old enough to have gained weight at menopause. As weight has an undeniable relationship with food, there’s nothing like a good look at the cart to find an explanation. I’ve even seen one with a very full cart taking out items for lack of money. Of the two frozen chickens, one comes out. The gaudy amount of snack packets, however, is sacred. As sacred as a pack of cigarettes, perhaps.
I conjecture that the price of the snack may be part of the explanation. It’s cheap, but an unruly person eats at once. So it needs more and more packages, so the effect on the budget ends up looking like crack, since the stone is cheap, but nobody uses just one stone. Add this to the inability to make calculations, and imagine the dimension that a package of daily snacks will have on the budget and health of someone who earns a minimum wage.
Numbers from IBGE
But let’s go to the official numbers. According to the IBGE (see page 37 of this PDF here), at
more of a fifth (22, 9%) of Brazilian women from 15 The 17 years was overweight, against 16% of males in the same age group. On the page 40, we find the overweight statistics for the other age groups, ranging from 18 to “60 years and more”. Altogether, 60% of the Brazilian population is overweight, being 60 , 5% of men and 64, 6% of women (by the way, those with normal BMI can declare ourselves minority and ask for a quota). Overall, the discrepancy between the sexes is not that great. It is possible to point out an age group that is fatter than all the others: 41 to 1979 years (70%), against 57, 6% of the group between 25 and 39 years, and 64, 4% of the group of 60 up. As the alteration in metabolism makes many people gain weight with age, there must be a sociocultural explanation for having an age group that is fatter than the others. In 2019, this fat group comprised people born between 1960 and 1979 – period coinciding with the sexual revolution and the massive entry of women into the labor market.
This meant that there were no more fixed times for the family to eat together. At this rate, eating is not an individual decision. I suppose this inhibits the habit of binge eating. The fast food is usually blamed for the fattening of the population, but in Brazil at that time fast food was luxury and the families of middle class hired domestic servants. Lower-class women have always worked outside the home, so I suppose what counts most is a devaluation of the family ritual of sitting at the table and eating together. The maid observes that at her employer’s house, everyone eats whenever they want and then sets out to take this very modern habit to their own house, where the grandmother certainly takes care of a lot of grandchildren.
The other interesting thing to note is that the discrepancy between the sexes is overwhelming among teenagers and young adults. As we saw above, in the range of 15 to 17 years the difference is 6.9% between the sexes. In the range from 18 to 59 years, the difference is incredible 16%: 40, 1% female against 41 , 7% male. In the next age group, which is an exception, there are 1.3% more fat men than women. In the others, women earn 6% (40 to 64 years) and 2% (60 upwards). It seems, therefore, that Brazilian women born from 1995 have a strong propensity to be overweight. This has to have a sociocultural explanation.
Impact of the offer?
Let’s go back to my speculations at the cashier. Seeing the fat woman full of snacks, it occurred to me to look at the price of the goodies. I recognized, next to the cashier, in this city in the interior of the Northeast, in a market frequented by the inhabitants of the hills, the gelatinous and colorful worms that were a great luxury in my childhood. Once in your life and once in your death, you would go to the Multiplex cinema, at the Iguatemi mall, famous among adults for having a differentiated sound quality, and among children for selling colorful and sour sweets, instead of just popcorn. At least I wanted to go for the worms, not the movie. And I couldn’t find the blessed worms anywhere; they were the treats from the Multiplex.
The packet of lentils in my basket was about to die, but the colorful worms were a trifle. Of course, this is only worth comparing numbers, as a half-kilo pack of lentils is enough for several meals, while worms are not enough for none. In any case, the poor who don’t think well and want to please their children will take the worms – which will last very little.
All this influx of supply has to have some impact on decisions. In last year’s English documentary Tricked into Eating More, the villains are the food industry and supermarkets. They use those studies where mice switch from cocaine addiction to sugar addiction. Every now and then some researcher uses rats to verify that both substances are addictive. According to their explanation, the food industry creates foods designed to be addictive: they are not very nutritious and rich in substances that are addictive to the taste. I thought it was particularly relevant that they show the money that is spent on research in the food industry to captivate the customer, with a bunch of scientists in white coats looking at the appearance of yogurts and deciding how many dyes and emulsifiers to test. Much is said about private research promotion without taking into account that research can be carried out against the interest of the general population, by predatory corporations. On the other hand, here, where the supposed research is almost entirely public, the umpteenth article is being made to prove that capitalism is bad or that Paulo Freire is right. We need public research committed to the public, such as that carried out by Embrapa during the military period.
As for supermarkets, they arrange their products in a way that discourages the purchase of fresh products and encourages the purchase of pre-made products. -prepared full of sodium, more practical and addictive. Meanwhile, the industry is creating infinite flavors of the same product, so there is no risk of getting sick. Thus, the citizen who goes to a yogurt shelf today will find a much greater variety than in the decade of 64. And you will be able to spend a good time switching from yogurt to yogurt, or having more yogurts of different flavors.
Regulation paradise
Europeans are much more concerned about food than North Americans, and talking badly about their food there is a supranational sport. Another European supranational sport is regulations. There, where there are bureaucratic provisions on the curvature of cucumbers and bananas, an MEP proposes that labels (does a banana have a label?) clearly indicate the amount of fat, sugar, etc. The food corporations were against it, and her bill didn’t pass. They tried to treat unhealthy food like cigarettes, and surcharge, but it didn’t go away. In addition, concerned MEPs try to convince the UN to consider obesity a global health problem, but fail, again, because of the lobby. Unsurprisingly: any reader of Hayek knows that regulatory mania serves to favor monopoly. It is easier for supranational regulators to institute the snack as a right of obese women to be guaranteed by the State and to put NATO troops against the country that does not want to buy snacks to distribute to women.
Another curious fact shown by the documentary is the lawsuit suffered by Nutella by victims of its advertising: the company made an advertisement claiming that Nutella is part of a balanced meal. Both this episode and the proposed labels assume that the citizen is an idiot. Let’s face it: no one believes that Nutella is part of a balanced meal, nor that super processed foods are healthy. If companies make labels and advertisements claiming the opposite, it is because they rely on the bad faith accomplice of the spectator, who needs to deceive himself to fill his face with nonsense. I can take any sugary cereal and write “high in fiber”; nobody wants to tell me that the fat consumer thinks they will get healthy just by eating something “rich in fiber”. The demand for more and more labels supposes a citizen unable to think, who needs to collect a mathematician’s signature after making a bakery bill.
No intervention?
On the other hand, public interventions on private habits are admitted. Using condoms is for example. Do not leave standing water, ditto. The anti-smoking campaign made the PCC earn a lot by importing Paraguayan cigarettes, free of surcharge, but the ban on advertising aimed at young people seems salutary. Furthermore, a woman’s eating habits are hardly personal: the mother is the one who usually educates her children’s taste buds. Thus, a generation of fat young people is an indication of a future generation of fat Brazilians. Then life expectancy drops and nobody knows why.
There should be, at this moment, an intense investigation into the reasons for female fattening. The generation born from 1995 is called millennial, and differs from the previous ones because they grew up with the internet. I wouldn’t be extravagant if I said that social media affects girls’ mental health more than boys’ (this is a topic that Jonathan Haidt insists on). Nor will I commit any extravagance if I say that anxiety is prevalent in women and is associated with fattening.
The repercussion of data on fattening in Brazil was timid. In general, they try to explain it through the low price of fattening food. This explanation is not enough, because fattening from millenials is a female phenomenon. Also, these cheap foods are only cheap in the short term, like crack.
But the truth is that politicians would already do something thing if they stopped getting in the way. Isn’t it a little shame to import fat activism?
