The Myth of Individual Responsibility Regarding Obesity

When mining jobs disappeared in the 1970s and 1980s, communities were left with neither industrial employment nor the agricultural infrastructure that had once sustained them.

Into this vacuum stepped corporations like Dollar General, which has explicitly targeted rural communities with limited retail options. The company now operates over 17,000 locations nationwide, becoming the primary food retailer in many Appalachian communities while offering primarily processed foods with long shelf lives.

This transformation represents what food studies scholars call "food apartheid"—the systematic creation of environments where healthy food is scarce and expensive while processed food is ubiquitous and cheap.

When the PNAS study finds correlations between "ultra-processed foods" and higher body fat, it's describing not individual dietary failures but the predictable result of corporate strategies and policy decisions that create the conditions in which West Virginians and other rural Americans live.

The focus on dietary choices also ignores the environmental dimensions of health in Appalachia.

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What appears as individual dietary failure may partly result from involuntary chemical exposure—a possibility entirely absent from the PNAS study's framework.

The PNAS research exemplifies what Guthman calls the "molecular turn" in obesity studies—the tendency to reduce complex social phenomena to biological mechanisms. By focusing on energy expenditure and metabolic rates, the study treats bodies as closed systems responding to caloric inputs rather than as social beings shaped by historical, economic, and environmental forces.

We’re more like sponges soaking up the environment and less like unitary decision makers isolated from their surroundings.

This reductionist approach serves political and economic ideological functions.

It makes obesity appear as a technical problem with technical solutions rather than a social problem requiring political action. The study's conclusion that "public health efforts need to focus on diet" suggests that better nutrition education and individual behavior change can solve what is fundamentally a structural problem – like how markets distribute grocery stores and fresh vegetables.

The research also reflects what Guthman identifies as the "pathologization" of body diversity.

By using hunter-gatherer societies as implicit norms, the study treats higher body weights as inherently pathological rather than examining how different environments and social systems shape bodies in different ways. This framing reinforces the assumption that obesity is necessarily unhealthy and requires intervention.

Who benefits from framing obesity as a problem of individual dietary choices? It ain’t the people of WVa, but DG share holders and executive officers certainly benefit.