There's a never-ending litany of despair at the unhealthy lifestyles some people choose to live, and it is never their own fault. There's always a culprit beyond the individual to blame it on, and that culprit is usually associated with progress and prosperity.
This time, it's information and communication technology (ICT) that makes us fat. A Milken Institute report, ponderously entitled: “Waistlines of the World: The Effect of Information and Communications Technology on Obesity” finds that there's a correlation between a country's spending on ICT and its obesity levels, which the report promptly treats as causative.
“In the past two decades, there has been a worldwide transition toward an 'information/knowledge-based society' that led to changes in work habits and lifestyle. As a side effect, people started consuming more calories than they expended, which resulted in weight gain and obesity,” the authors snivel.
“...technological innovations, more processed foods, a greater amount of 'screen' time ... decreased energy expenditure, and/or higher consumption of snack foods have all played a role,” they continue.
“Additionally, the rise in dual-income households as more women joined the workforce has also had a massive effect on the shape of the human body. Families began dining out more, buying more processed foods, and exercising less as their use of cars and public transit increased,” they lament.
“The main culprit is the knowledge-based society. Employment patterns have shifted toward service-sector jobs that require long hours in front of a computer. Waistlines are growing, too. We used to be paid to exercise: It was called work. The effect has been aggravated by urbanisation, which led people to drive or take public transportation rather than walk.”
Let's ignore the trivial objection that sedentary, office-bound jobs, or indeed the search for “white-collar” work are not some new consequence of the technology of the last two decades. Before we had computers, the same work that one person can now do with a spreadsheet and a word processor would have been performed by dozens of low-paid clerks and typists, who worked long hours chained to their desks and ate beans and spam for dinner. And for centuries, people have aspired to the prosperity of comfortable sinecures in royal courts, town administration, merchant counting houses or the church.
Blaming technology for people's lax habits seems, well, lazy.
Ivo Vegter, contributor, ITWeb
Let's stipulate that sitting at a desk all day and not getting any exercise is probably bad for you. No dispute there. However, the report proposes all sorts of government and employer-funded “incentives” and “policies”, “innovative programmes” in the community, and what they ominously term “behavioural modification counselling”.
Blaming technology for people's lax habits seems, well, lazy. But, much scarier is the presumption that we have the right to impose on those we judge to be neglecting their physical well-being with “pre-emptive interventions” and “behavioural modification counselling”. This kind of prescriptive moralising about state, corporate and community responsibility for the physical health of individuals, smacks of the exercise fetish glorified by Prussian nationalists such as Heinrich von Treitschke, and reincarnated in fascist propaganda films exulting the sound body, sound mind of the superior race.
Undoubtedly, the “mens sana in corpore sano” maxim is a wise one, once divorced from the context of its nationalist, militaristic, patriarchal and racist history. It is good old-fashioned common sense. Who didn't grow up with sage advice about the salutary effects of morning calisthenics, a brisk afternoon stroll, joining a football club, or cycling to work? But I also grew up with the idea that it was my own responsibility to look after myself, and that if I failed out of sheer laxness, I only had myself to blame.
Now, with dubious studies funded by junk bond racketeers (yes, that Michael Milken) and conducted by moralising busybodies who sit behind their computers all day, lazily exercise nothing but their correlation formulae, we're cajoled into blaming our personal failings on computers, remote controls, convenient food, factory automation, office work, motorised transport and urbanisation - in short, all the great benefits of modern society.
Let's take these whingers at their word, then. Let's get the women back in the kitchen and the lazy men back in the fields. Abolish cars, put an end to office work, and maybe establish nationalist work camps for those who insist on spending too little time at hard labour... I mean, exercise.
Admittedly, this will all make us very much poorer and return global life expectancy to the 35 or so we enjoyed during the Middle Ages, but at least in those rustic, idyllic times, only the curates, princes and greasy moneylenders were fat.
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Report: Tech makes you fat