05/28/2026
Blame for the Obesity Epidemic Falls on Food Industry
MedScape - May 14, 2026
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/blame-obesity-epidemic-falls-food-industry-2026a1000fl3?ecd=WNL_trdalrt_pos1_260515_etid8347556&uac=445044EN&impID=8347556
The rise of new weight-loss drugs could help reframe obesity as a societal failure driven by the food industry, rather than lack of personal willpower.
“These medications could redirect blame for obesity from individual failings to the pervasive influence of commercial food systems, drawing parallels with historical public health successes against to***co and alcohol,” Luc Hagenaars, PhD, Department of Public and Occupational Health, Amsterdam UMC in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Laura Schmidt, PhD, Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, University of California San Francisco, wrote. “This reframing is crucial for addressing escalating obesity rates and associated chronic diseases.”
Framing obesity as a disease of individuals, as is the case now with current definitions of obesity, “comes with some unintended consequences,” Hagenaars said. “One is that it frames obesity as a medical condition that needs treatment, and that undermines public and political support for tackling the epidemic’s root cause — namely, the food environment, including financial incentives for an industry focused on maximizing sales of highly palatable, ultraprocessed foods (UPFs).”
Schmidt added, “The focus on individual responsibility has been a marketing strategy deployed by the food industry to take the focus off its own culpability in flooding our food environment with unhealthy, hyperpalatable food products. When 70% of what’s in your grocery store is UPF, what real choice do individuals have?”
“We need to be careful not to replace one overly simple story with another. ‘It’s all personal responsibility’ is wrong and harmful. But ‘it’s all the food industry’ is also incomplete.”
