Why can't we stop eating certain foods? - BBC

even if they want to cut down even if they know it's killing them they find they can't stop my name is Chris vankin I'm an NHS doctor I'm a scientist and I'm part of a growing group of doctors and academics who are increasingly worried about the effect that the global food system is having on all of us when it comes to obesity the way that we've understood the problem is it's a failure of willpower people are just making bad choices they're somewhat lazy it's basically their fault this is American government data for men and women of all different ages the different lines of different ages for obesity what you see is between 1960 and 1975 there's a fairly steady percentage of obesity in the population but in the mid 1970s obesity starts going up in all of the groups [Music] simultaneously now if you're saying willpower is responsible what you're proposing is that all of these groups of people simultaneously lost moral responsibility and that's not plausible something else happened to our food in the mid 1970s to make it irresistible to people my name is John Ruff and uh I've spent 40 years in the food industry across seven different countries companies spent a lot of time optimizing all aspects of their product the flavor The Taste the texture people want their product to be as good it's not better than the competitor um so it will sell more we use train sensory panels to give us ratings is it squishy is it hard is it soft is it crunchy and that's very much how the food industry operates one thing many people don't realize is that factory processing changes the textural properties of food an interesting fact about soft food is you're not chewing it as much that actually short circuits the normal satiety mechanisms that you would have if you were actually chewing food properly so you're bypassing a normal mechanism that tells you you're full once youve worked out that playing around with the texture of food making it softer tricks that normal satiety or fullness...