A couple of days ago, I wrote that the existing competing narratives of obesity don’t really “get” the role of gluttony* right, because they lack philosophical grounding in the nature of gluttony.
The calorie-is-a-calorie crowd say that gluttony — eating too much — is the whole problem, with some contribution from sloth, and if people would just eat less they’d get thin. They’ve got the biochemistry wrong, and have unfairly accused fat people of causing their own disease by being gluttons.
The insulin-resistance people (think Gary Taubes) have the chemistry right, in my opinion, but they reject the idea of gluttony playing a part at all. I think that’s wrong too. Even though I’m convinced that metabolic syndrome exists and is caused by a diet high in refined carbohydrates and sugar and that it perpetuates a vicious cycle of eating and craving, I think gluttony is involved, and beating gluttony is part of the cure.
In this post (and a couple more) I want to explore the role of gluttony in obesity. Starting with the question: Does gluttony — technically defined gluttony — cause obesity?
+ + +
The insulin-resistance crowd, whom I think is correct as regards the biochemistry, says No: Gluttony, or “eating too much,” does not cause obesity; obesity is caused by eating the wrong things, not too much of everything. Eating more than you burn doesn’t cause weight gain; weight gain causes eating more than you burn.
But we aren’t actually interested in that answer, because it’s the answer to the wrong question. The common, ordinary meaning of “glutton” is just “someone who eats too much.” That’s the definition they are using. But moral philosophers have defined “gluttony” more broadly than that for hundreds of years. Recall that Aquinas subdivided gluttony into five categories: eating too expensively, too daintily, too much, too soon, or too eagerly. Aquinas was also perfectly aware that it didn’t count as a sin if you didn’t realize you were eating out of order, or if you had doctor’s orders, or something like that.
More recently, I proposed an alternate definition of gluttony that drew brighter lines: Gluttony, I wrote, is eating behavior that flouts the restraints of charity, obedience, resources, health, duty, or manners. These sound more promising ways to pin the blame on gluttony, especially when it comes to the “health” bit. But I agree with Aquinas that it can’t count as a sin if you don’t know your eating is wrong — if you think you need the food.
If we use Aquinas’s definitions, the following are obvious:
- Gluttony could be a cause of obesity, if eating too much causes obesity.
- But even if eating too much did cause obesity, gluttony wouldn’t necessarily be the problem because eating too much doesn’t qualify as gluttony if the eater has good reason to believe it wasn’t too much. For example, if he was truly experiencing feelings of hunger.
Seeking out food when you’re hungry is not gluttonous behavior; it’s normal behavior.
And guess what? One of the things that metabolic syndrome causes is hunger and carbohydrate cravings. This is from Why We Get Fat:
Even before we begin eating, insulin works to increase our feeling of hunger…. we begin secreting insulin just by thinking about eating… and this insulin secretion then increases within seconds of taking our first bite. It happens even before we begin to digest the meal, and before any glucose appears in the bloodstream. This insulin serves to prepare our bodies for the upcoming flood of glucose by storing away other nutrients in the circulation — particularly fatty acids. …
…The insulin makes us hungry by temporarily diverting nutrients out of the circulation and into storage… The greater the blood sugar and insulin response to a particular food, the more we like it — the better we think it tastes….
[T]he fatter [predisposed people] get, the more they’ll crave carbohydrate-rich foods, because their insulin will be more effective at stashing fat and protein in their muscle and fat tissue, where they can’t be used for fuel.
Once we get resistant to insulin… we’ll … have longer periods during every twenty-four hours when the only fuel we can burn is the glucose from carbohydrates. The insulin, remember, is working to keep protein and fat and even glycogen… safely stashed away for later. It’s telling our cellls that there is blood sugar in excess to be burned, but there’s not. So it’s glucose we crave.
Grossly oversimplified, elevated insulin is supposed to make you hungry, makes you want to eat carbs in particular, and makes you store fat at the same time. So even though from the outside, a heavy person may appear to be eating too much, from the inside the person may be experiencing unbearable hunger. And hunger is the normal drive to eat.
I live with one of those weird, always-lean people:
Mostly he eats pretty moderately: oatmeal for breakfast, soup and salad at lunch, maybe a couple helpings at dinner, a little ice cream at bedtime. On occasion, however, I have seen him put away what looks to me like an enormous amount of food. The equivalent of two or three cheeseburgers or something like that in the space of a few minutes. Is he a closet, occasional glutton? Perhaps suffering from binge disorder?
No. The “binges” happen after a day of skiing, or hiking at altitude, or heavy yard work, or maybe rock climbing. When he exerts himself, he needs to eat more.
As astonishing as it is to people like me who have had to think about food their whole lives, I hear that this is what actually happens in metabolically healthy people. They don’t need to think “Does that workout mean I get to eat more?” because their body tells them to eat more. So they do. And we never accuse those people of gluttony — because they don’t look fat.
Anyway, there is no moral difference between a fat person who gets extra-hungry and therefore eats extra food, and a thin person who gets extra-hungry and therefore eats extra food. Even if the reason for the hunger is different — in one person, excess insulin, and in the other person, excess physical activity — the subjective experience of the need for food may be the same.
Look, Aquinas knows this:
…[T]he sin of gluttony is rather extenuated than aggravated…in consideration of the necessity of taking food, as also on account of the difficulty of discerning and regulating what is suitable on such occasions.
Gluttony is mitigated insofar as it is difficult to “discern” and “regulate” what is suitable. Metabolic syndrome creates a feeling of hunger, and that is exactly what makes it difficult to discern and regulate what is suitable to eat.
+ + +
So, if it’s true that eating the wrong things (too much sugar and white flour and potatoes, for instance) creates metabolic syndrome, can that count as gluttony? Maybe under the “too expensively” or “too daintily” categories?
It might, if a person (before they developed the syndrome) knew that they were eating too much of the wrong things and obstinately persisted.
Culpability is hard to establish, though, because in many cases it isn’t an entirely free choice to do so:
- many people begin to develop metabolic syndrome while they are still children, being fed by parents and institutions;
- government policy has been giving us counterproductive advice for more than a generation;
- the low-fat doctrine is still pushed heavily by schools and physicians;
- we seemingly reasonably assume that if we’re not visibly obese yet, we must be doing okay;
- the food that promotes metabolic syndrome is ubiquitous, widely advertised, and cheap.
It isn’t impossible for gluttony to cause obesity. But for that to happen you’d have to posit an apparently healthy individual who, as an adult, and knowing that it was bad for him, made a free choice to begin consuming large portions of sugar and white flour until he wrecked his metabolism.
I think this might happen sometimes. It’s the sort of thing that people say will happen to kids who are raised in homes barren of soda pop and sugary cereal: As soon as they’re out on their own, they’ll go crazy, subsisting on fast food, Cheez Whiz, and Captain Crunch. (One of my friends in grad school claimed to have known a guy in her college dorm who actually got scurvy his freshman year.)
Most of the time, though, I think we just sort of slide into metabolic syndrome, not by eating a diet that is obviously unhealthy, but by eating… the normal American diet. Normal Americans drink soda, eat white bread and white rice, and consume a lot of sugar in the course of an ordinary day. Some are more susceptible than others, and those people develop metabolic syndrome, gain weight, and get hungrier — so they begin to eat regularly in a way that looks like gluttony, from the outside. But because of the subjective experience of hunger, we can’t automatically call it that.
+ + +
The next question I want to consider is whether metabolic syndrome causes gluttony, of any of the types that Aquinas identified or that I reclassified. I’ve already written that eating in response to real hunger isn’t, I think, gluttonous. But is that the only kind of behavior change created by metabolic syndrome?
I’m going to cover that in another post.
*[Editing note. Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.
I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else. I touch on what I’m talking about a little more clearly partway through this post.
I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them. Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]
bearing blog 