Letter: Fat is a fear issue

From Louise Inkel

While the authorities in the western world prepare to allocate fortunes in public funds to address a growing obesity problem in their populations, your article “Supersize surprise” eloquently shows how little we understand of the phenomenon (4 November, p 34). I would like to suggest an avenue of research that may not yet have been explored to explain such widespread obesity. You could call this the “impending doom factor”.

Could the human animal be reacting to daily poundings of threats to its very survival? Be it cataclysmic climate change or Armageddon, such threats of impending doom can surely trigger behaviours meant to ensure survival. Just as other animals make provision for winter (often in the form of body fat), couldn’t we be unconsciously taking measures to withstand the threatened hardships?

There have been wars and famines throughout human history, but never before has there been such an abundance of available food. If there seems to be no hope of avoiding doom – if, for example, our leaders refuse to act on climate change or seem dead set on engaging in a new world conflict that promises to be a major slaughter – what can the individual human do but prepare for the worst?

Even if some of these dangers are imagined rather than real, trying to curb behaviours that increase body fat may be useless, as they are mere symptoms of a will to survive in the face of a perceived peril.

Montreal, Quebec, Canada