Are You Really Ready To Clean Up Your Act?; Maybe You Need to Understand Your Bad Habits
Washington Post
January 2, 2007

We're fat. We smoke. Drink too much. Don't exercise enough. And our stress levels are off the charts. We're killing ourselves, and we know it.
 
And yet we carry on -- overeating, lighting up, slumping in front of the television and throwing back another beer -- inspiring some of the greatest thinkers in the worlds of genomics, neuroscience, biochemistry and evolutionary psychology to ponder the Big Mac of medical questions: Why is it so hard for people to change? Is it possible that we're missing a self-discipline gene?
 
Unlikely, though recent research synthesized by the National Academy of Sciences suggests there may be combinations of genes and environmental factors that make it hard for some people to maintain control over their habits.
 
…
 
"Marketers hardly limit themselves to rational appeals," says Richard Daynard, a Northeastern University School of Law professor who was involved in early tobacco litigation and has now turned his sights to the obesity problem. "In the public fantasy, the rational appeals are supposed to balance people's decisions."
 
What does work in terms of bridging the gap between public knowledge and personal health, he believes, is something the tobacco wars revealed.
 
After the American Legacy Foundation launched its "Truth" campaign to billboard what it said was the coverup of evidence about smoking's deleterious health effects, consumers complained of having been burned by the tobacco industry.
 
"You've got to go to issues that get people emotionally upset, get to their guts, get to where people live," Daynard says. On the healthy eating/exercising/stress-reduction front, "I don't think the battle's actually even begun."