One Cause of Obesity

~ Clarissa

There are several reasons for the dramatic increase in obesity rates in the US in the past 3 decades. One reason that never gets discussed is the anti-smoking campaign that has intensified alongside this increase.

Smoking addiction develops as a result of oral trauma. Once smoking as a way of managing oral trauma becomes more inconvenient, socially less acceptable, more expensive and more onerous, people will move to the next available substitute. Overeating is that substitute.

You know what other manifestation of oral trauma has exploded alongside the smoking bans? Virulent, angry speech of the kind we see on the Internet. These enraged Internet users who erupt in uncontrollable and outlandish insults to everybody they meet online are the orally traumatized. (Yes, me too, obviously.)

None of this means that the connection is as direct as all former smokers overeating and being angry online. It means that as a traumatized person looks around for the most convenient and socially acceptable way to self-soothe, s/he will gravitate towards overeating when 20 years ago s/he might have moved towards smoking.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that the anti-smoking campaign shouldn’t have taken place. It simply means that you can ban the practice but there is no ban one can place on trauma. The trauma remains and will find a way to manifest itself.

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Published by Clarissa

8 thoughts on “One Cause of Obesity”

  1. Unfortunately, this issue has been studied, and the evidence has been found wanting:

    The strong negative correlation over time between smoking rates and obesity have led some to suggest that reduced smoking is increasing weight gain in the U.S. This conclusion is supported by the findings of Chou et al. [Chou, S.-Y., Grossman, M., Saffer, H., 2004. An economic analysis of adult obesity: results from the behavioral risk factor surveillance system. Journal of Health Economics 23, 565–587], who conclude that higher cigarette prices lead to increased body weight. We investigate this issue and find no evidence that reduced smoking leads to weight gain. Using the cigarette tax rather than the cigarette price and controlling for non-linear time effects, we find a negative effect of cigarette taxes on body weight, implying that reduced smoking leads to lower body weights. Yet our results, as well as Chou et al., imply implausibly large effects of smoking on body weight. Thus, we cannot confirm that falling smoking leads in a major way to rising obesity rates in the U.S.

    http://economics.mit.edu/files/6430

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  2. Smoking has its uses. I remember the late Gil Sorrentino – the wonderful novelist and Stanford professor – telling me that smoking cigarettes helped him stay at his desk in front of his typewriter, writing and working. (Gil died of lung cancer in 2006. I will never know, but I would bet that he did not regret having his habit.)

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      1. When we were undergrads, Jay Rosen (now NYU prof / social-media analyst) told me he would never try to persuade people to give up smoking … unless he was ready to hold their hands as they addressed and reconciled the fifteen issues on which smoking had kept a lid.

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        1. “When we were undergrads, Jay Rosen (now NYU prof / social-media analyst) told me he would never try to persuade people to give up smoking … unless he was ready to hold their hands as they addressed and reconciled the fifteen issues on which smoking had kept a lid.”

          • He is a brilliant fellow. That’s exactly how this works.

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