A couple of summers ago, my mom, my brother, and I were eating lunch and talking about climate change, probably because of the floods we’d seen hit Senegal, where we used to live, or the dramatic rainfall patterns in Panama, where we were living at the time. In that conversation, a question stuck with me: Could targeting obesity be used to address climate change?
That question is why I think obesity could be America’s most useful Trojan horse: a way to sneak real reform into a food, transportation, and healthcare system that badly needs it, under a banner most people already support.
Common Causes
A multinational commission writing in The Lancet made a case for tackling climate change, malnutrition, and obesity together because they share the same root causes. Tim Lobstein of the World Obesity Federation, who served on that commission, called this three-headed monster of issues a “synergy of co-occurring pandemics which interact with each other in place and time and have common societal and economic drivers.”
Here’s how the loop works. Farming and clearing land for cattle and crops pumps out greenhouse gases — by the commission‘s estimate, agriculture accounts for a quarter to a third of the global total, with cattle alone responsible for over half of that. The pollution from this process, including endocrine-disrupting chemicals, doesn’t just heat the planet — it interferes with the hormones that regulate body weight. Then climate damage brings droughts and floods that wreck local produce farming, pushing people toward cheaper, heavily processed, meat-heavy diets and away from healthier, more sustainably farmed foods. Add a car-dependent transportation system, which the commission blames for both a meaningful share of global emissions and for the decline in everyday physical activity, and you get a cycle that reinforces itself: more emissions, more obesity, more demand for exactly the food production that started the problem.
Levers and Drivers
The commission points to three levers here: crops, cattle, and cars. U.S. subsidies favor commodity crops like corn and wheat that feed the processed-food supply chain. Red meat production requires two drivers of climate change: a mass production of animal feed and the destruction of forests. And a transportation system built around cars, rather than walking, biking, or transit, feeds both the obesity and the climate crisis at once, generating 14 to 25% of the heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
I’ll admit the “Trojan horse” framing can sound like it is blaming obese people, who tend to be among those in the working class and poor, for these complex issues. That’s not the argument. The problem is subsidy structures and infrastructure choices made decades ago, not necessarily individual decision-making or willpower, and any policy that treats obesity as a personal failing rather than a systems failure misses the point.
This is why the Trojan Horse framing is useful: the idea of addressing obesity becomes a way into more difficult conversations such as restructuring agricultural subsidies, redesigning our cities, and evolving the government’s long-established incentive structures. It’s a front door into conversations that otherwise are put to the side, not discussed enough, and ultimately forgotten about. And maybe if we start treating our health and our climate as the same emergency, we might actually get more done on both.
Featured image/photo courtesy of Pixabay.
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