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May 29 • 17 tweets • 5 min read
#RegenesisFact 10: A survey published in The Lancet discovered that over 90% of policymakers believe “personal motivation” is “a strong or very strong influence on the rise of obesity.” They have yet to explain how 2/3rds of us rapidly and simultaneously lost our willpower. 🧵
In reality, obesity is strongly associated with:
- Poverty
- Stress, anxiety and depression associated with low social status
- Time poverty
- Junk food formulation, designed to bypass our natural mechanisms of appetite control
- Junk food marketing
- Food deserts
Obesity is often associated with malnutrition. Bad food tends to be obesogenic. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, a good diet costs five times as much as one that’s merely adequate in terms of calories.
Advertisers working for junk food companies use psychologists and neuroscientists to unlock our weaknesses and discover ingenious ways of persuading us to buy unhealthy food.
The same food companies then employ biddable scientists and thinktanks to argue that weight is a question of “personal responsibility”. In other words, after spending billions overriding our self-control, they blame us for failing to exercise it.
Obesity is a communicable disease. Its vectors are corporations.
Sources: i. Anthony Rodgers et al., 2018. Prevalence trends tell us what did not precipitate the US obesity epidemic. The Lancet Public Health, volume 3, issue 4, E162-E163. doi.org/10.1016/S2468-…
ii. Carl Baker, 11 January 2021. Research Briefing - Obesity Statistics. House of Commons Library. commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-brief…
iii. Pilyoung Kim et al, 2017. How Socioeconomic Disadvantages Get Under the Skin and into the Brain to Influence Health Development Across the Lifespan. In: Halfon N.et al (eds) Handbook of Life Course Health Development. Springer. doi.org/10.1007/978-3-…
iv. The Equality Trust. Obesity - Obesity is less common in more equal societies. equalitytrust.org.uk/obesity
v. Ferris Jabr, 1 January 2016. How Sugar and Fat Trick the Brain into Wanting More Food. Scientific American. scientificamerican.com/article/how-su…
vi. Kevin Hall et al, 2019. Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: An Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial of Ad Libitum Food Intake. Cell Metabolism 30, 67–77. doi.org/10.1016/j.cmet…
vii. Rocco Barazzoni and Gianluca Gortan Cappellari, 2020. Double burden of malnutrition in persons with obesity. Reviews in Endocrine and Metabolic Disorders, issue 21, pp. 307–313. doi.org/10.1007/s11154…
viii. UNFAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, 2020. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020. Transforming food systems for affordable healthy diets. Rome, FAO. doi.org/10.4060/ca9692…
ix. Sarah Boseley, 25 May 2018. Food firms could face litigation over neuromarketing to hijack brains. The Guardian. theguardian.com/society/2018/m…
x. Anahad O’Connor, 9 August 2015. Coca Cola funds scientists who shift blame for obesity away from bad diets. The New York Times. well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/coc…
xi. Cristin E. Kearns, Laura A. Schmidt and Stanton A. Glantz, 2016. Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research. Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), JAMA Internal Medicine, 176 (11), pp. 1680–1685. doi.org/10.1001/jamain…

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More from @GeorgeMonbiot

George Monbiot Profile picture
May 30
#RegenesisFact 11: Across 7 years, the UK government spent £6 billion in foreign aid supporting farming overseas. NOT ONE PENNY of this money was spent on projects whose main focus was the development or promotion of agroecology. 🧵
In fact, no money was spent on organic farming of any kind: it was all poured into the kind of agriculture the private sector already promotes, consolidating the rise of the Global Standard Farm. This, the researchers found, was typical of the aid disbursements by rich nations.
While organic farming and agroecology are not always a formula for good practice, and can have major problems of their own, unless we can shift farming towards a low-impact, high-yield model (of the kind I explore in Regenesis), it's hard to see how we'll sustain our food supply.
Read 5 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
May 29
I’ve emerged from another horrible pile-on, this time on Facebook. This one was *really* weird. It was started by Craig Sams, co-founder of Whole Earth Foods and Green & Blacks and former chair of the Soil Association.🧵
In Regenesis, I gave a price for agricultural lime (across 80km) of £50 a tonne. This, Craig said, was “Wrong. Plain wrong. The cheapest lime you can buy is £600 delivered.” He suggested it was “a manipulation of figures” to make a point: I was lying. “Shame on you Mr. Monbiot”🧵
Then it got really nasty. It was reposted by a prominent farmer, and in both threads I was accused of being a liar, a fraud, a charlatan and much worse (I won’t repeat what some people said). Many of those making these claims were farmers or growers.
Read 7 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
May 27
#RegenesisFact 8: Tomas Linder, associate professor of agricultural sciences, has compared the land area needed to grow protein through precision fermentation to the most efficient agricultural method, US soybean farming. The results are astonishing: 🧵
In a typical year, soybeans occupy 36.5m ha of the US, an area greater than Italy. The land required to produce the same amount of protein by growing bacteria is 21,000 ha: the size of the city of Cleveland, Ohio. In other words, you’d need 1,700 times less land to grow it.
The land-use ratio is even greater when you compare it to animal products, as you can see from this chart.

Chicken needs roughly 5,000x as much land as microbial protein
Pork 8,000x
Beef 126,000x
Lamb 142,000x
Read 22 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
May 27
1. I see that Polyface-style farming – chickens following cattle around the fields – is now taking off in the UK. And people are saying, “isn’t it wonderful – the chickens don’t need to be fed.” Let’s think about this for a moment. 🧵
2. It seems unlikely to me that a significant amount of chicken meat can be raised without supplementary feeding. I’d be surprised if there isn’t some quiet grain scattering going on. But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume the chickens are fending for themselves.
3. Chickens, like pheasants, are omnivorous birds that are non-native in the UK. They eat anything small enough that crosses their path. I’ve seen them tear frogs apart. They’ll eat baby snakes, insects of all kinds, seeds, fungi, the lot.
Read 5 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
May 26
#RegenesisFact 7: A perennial rice variety developed by @NatureAsMeasure and Yunnan University is now on sale, fulfilling a dream scientists have pursued for a century. It has been harvested 6 times without resowing, with the same yields as annual rice. 🧵
Almost all the grain we eat comes from annual plants, that live and die within one year. Large areas dominated by annual plants are rare in nature. They tend to colonise ground in the wake of catastrophe: fire, flood, landslide or volcanic eruption that exposes bare rock or soil.
In growing annuals, we must keep the land in the catastrophic state they prefer. Every year, we must clear the soil of competing plants, puncture or turn it, and plaster it with the nutrients required to raise a crop from seed to maturity in a few months.
Read 10 tweets
George Monbiot Profile picture
May 26
It’s publication day! In researching Regenesis, I found hope where hope seemed absent. I stumbled across astonishing stories and unimagined possibilities. I pieced together what I see as a plausible future for humanity and the wonderful life with which we share this planet. 🧵
Some of my proposals will at first seem outlandish, but please remember that the themes in Feral went from “this is ridiculous!” to accepted wisdom in just 9 years.
There is always more to the world than we imagine. More horror, but also more hope. More cruelty, but more possibility. Systems we are scarcely aware of, that behave in astonishing ways. Systems that can be changed. We can change course in less time than you might think.
Read 6 tweets

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