The American paradox describes a population preoccupied with health and nutritious eating while simultaneously finding itself fat and sick from an excess of calories and deficit of nutrients. The basis of this assertion can mostly be attributed to a series of shifts in how food is produced, consumed and perceived. Most Americans are overfed and undernourished because of the contributions of industry and science to a caloric and non-nutritious diet as well as the social and economic politics around food; both of which serving to detach consumers from their eating and health. The overfeeding of Americans can be linked to the changes in food production in America. Food industrialization and its economics encouraged modern agriculture to produce foods cheaply through the subsidization of commodities like corn and soy. This prompted an increase in new “food-like products” that offered caloric density in exchange for nutritional quality. As nutritionism and a surplus of cheap calories “came to market”, food science was employed to engineer foods for increased consumer appeal rather than health. Foods were infused with new ingredients not only to extend their shelf life and enhance taste and aesthetics, but to make them addicting by increasing carbohydrates from corn sugar. The results are described as …show more content…
Julie Gutham (2011), author of Weighing In, describes obesity as a result of neoliberal capitalist policies that treat “bodies as material entities literally absorbing the conditions and externalities of production and consumption” (p. 182). Overfeeding is no longer merely a matter of consumer will, but is also controlled by an industry whose goal is to provide the cheapest, least nutritious food to a society of sick and addicted