Scientific understanding is challenging the conventional wisdom about hunger — now framing it as a scourge that afflicts not only people who get too few calories, but also those who consume mostly sugar and refined starch. Under this new understanding, people eating the wrong kind of diet can suffer from both hunger and obesity.
A more scientifically accurate view of hunger and obesity couldn’t come at a better time. Obesity affects about 40 percent of the U.S. population, almost one in four Americans had trouble affording food in 2021, and the price of food has risen more than 11 percent since this time last year.
So nutrition experts rightly applauded last week’s White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health, since the discussion steered away from helping people get enough calories and instead focused on getting people enough real food. That’s also the focus behind a multibillion-dollar Biden administration initiative to end hunger in America by 2030.
The idea that the kind of food matters more than the number of calories consumed started as a heretical minority view but has gradually become mainstream. The old thinking that all calories are alike and obesity was caused by lack of willpower couldn’t explain why poverty, food deserts and obesity have been concentrated in the same communities.
“That puzzled me for many years — how could it be that people who were hungry or didn’t seem to have enough money to buy enough food could be more overweight or obese than people who had lots of resources,” said Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health.
“We have learned a lot over the years. There are multiple lines that connect poverty, food insecurity and obesity. One of the most important connections is just simply poor food quality.”
If this new scientific view is correct, it means hunger has actually contributed to the dramatic rise in obesity over the last 30 years — a 70 percent increase in adults, and an 85 percent rise in children.
David Ludwig, an endocrinologist at Harvard School of Public Health and Boston Children’s Hospital, is lead author of a new paper that explains how hunger and obesity might be connected.
“We argued … that when fat cells in the body get triggered to take in too many calories, there are too few calories for the rest of the body, and that’s why we get hungry,” Ludwig said. “That’s surprising for people, but it’s well demonstrated.”
If that idea is right, it calls for a very different solution to America’s hunger and obesity problems than the conventional view that people gain weight because they lack self-control and eat too much.
It’s much more likely that prehistoric people ate the right kinds of food — what humans are well-adapted to eat to be strong, healthy and energetic. That includes meat, fish, dairy, fruit, vegetables and, after farming was invented, whole grains such as brown rice and wheat berries.
There can be a lot of variety in a healthy diet: Ludwig points out that traditional cultures from the Inuit to Laplanders to Plains Indians ate diets high in animal fat during much of the year, while other cultures thrive on mostly plants. What nobody seems to thrive on is sugar, white flour, soda and fries. In his experience, people choose the wrong foods for economic reasons. “Many low-income families would love to have access to healthier whole foods.”
Humans are diverse in our shapes and sizes — we don’t all have to be skinny to be healthy, and some obese people may be suffering from hunger. Can a government initiative really end hunger by 2030 — just eight years from now? The Biden administration might need more help from Congress for such an ambitious goal, but any effort that starts with a science-based approach will help save and improve many lives.
Faye Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the “Follow the Science” podcast.
