Joan Ifland, principal organizer of the Promising Practices in Food Addiction conference last weekend in Houston, shared some back-of-the-envelope figuring, and suggested that overeating is responsible for 7 percent of the economy. It went like this:

Food is responsible for about 15 percent of the economy.

On average, Americans take in twice as many calories as we need.

If everyone ate at levels to sustain ourselves nutritionally, then demand for half of that 15 percent would disappear. 


Even if you want to quarrel with the numbers, you’ve got to concede the logic: Lots of people are obviously eating more than they need to sustain themselves. Apart from the farmers in that cohort, those folks are paying for that food, and companies are profiting from it.

If we start cutting back to healthy proportions, this will be bad for the bottom line. I don’t think the food-industrial complex is going to like that.