The Los Angeles City Council ban on new fast food restaurants in South L.A. might be a step in the right direction (depending on who you talk to), but it’s going to take a lot more work and a good deal of political wrestling to solve the obesity epidemic in America, let alone Los Angeles.

South L.A. faces some of the most serious economic challenges in the county, and “poverty is the strongest socio-demographic determinant of obesity,” says Dr. Antronette Yancey, an associate professor at UCLA’s School of Public Health and co-director of the Center to Eliminate Health Disparities.

Yancey writes in an e-mail interview that she agrees with the moratorium because it “brings widespread attention to the obesity and chronic disease disparities in southern L.A.”

If the city council succeeds in its long-term goal of rezoning South L.A. to attract new businesses, residents there may get access to healthier shopping and dining choices on par with the west side, and though many franchisees and restaurant associations don’t agree with the council’s method, it’s hard to see how better city planning in poor neighborhoods is a bad thing.

However, a report in 2007 by the Los Angeles County Department of Health (the same one cited by city council members) suggests that children in South L.A. experience only a slightly higher rate of obesity than the city average. A quarter of Angeleno children are overweight with or without healthy food options, so leveling the playing field won’t do much to solve the broader problem.

Americans overeat, favor unhealthy foods, and don’t get enough exercise. That much seems clear. But changing these habits at the societal level could require a fundamental overhaul across a variety of sectors both public and private, from farming to infrastructure.

“We are surrounded by a smorgasbord of highly palatable, pervasively marketed, inexpensive, readily accessible, nutrient-poor but energy-dense foods,” Yancey wrote in the April 2007 issue of the journal Obesity Management. “Coupled with seductive sedentary entertainment and transportation options and re-engineering of the built environment to favor automobile transportation over pedestrian or mass transit, our genetic ‘hard-wiring’ [to avoid exercise and eat salty, sweet and fatty foods] easily explains the occurrence of the small caloric excesses and energy expenditure deficits necessary to produce the epidemic.”

Even culture plays a part in overeating. According to Yancey we’re just as likely to stop eating when our favorite show ends or our date finishes her meal as we are when our bellies are full.

So turn off the television at dinner time, sit around the table with your family, and dish up smaller portions. Simple enough. But how do you unravel something as politically tangled as, say, farm policy?

Michael Pollan, director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism at UC-Berkeley and author most recently of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” boils the epidemic down to a stupidly simple equation: overproduction of food equals overeating.

Government subsidies backed by powerful food industry lobbyists allow farmers to get paid whether or not there’s a market for their crop, Pollan argues. So they overproduce. Overproduction devalues the crop, so restaurants and food suppliers maintain their revenues by adding value to the end product (more highly processed foods) or by beefing up the portions (supersize it).

Pollan:

“Cheap corn, transformed into high-fructose corn syrup, is what allowed Coca-Cola to move from the svelte 8-ounce bottle of soda ubiquitous in the 70’s to the chubby 20-ounce bottle of today. Cheap corn, transformed into cheap beef, is what allowed McDonald’s to supersize its burgers and still sell many of them for no more than a dollar. Cheap corn gave us a whole raft of new highly processed foods, including the world-beating chicken nugget, which, if you study its ingredients, you discover is really a most ingenious transubstantiation of corn, from the cornfed chicken it contains to the bulking and binding agents that hold it together.”

Pollan argues in the same article in 2003 that attacking the food suppliers directly won’t work because they’re only playing by the government’s rules. His proposed solution is that we rewrite agricultural policy so it doesn’t subsidize overproduction and in turn overeating.

“Until we somehow deal with this surfeit of calories coming off the farm, it is unlikely that even the most well-intentioned food companies or public-health campaigns will have much success changing the way we eat,” he writes.

That’s bad news for city council members and activists alike. Even worse news—Congress had its chance in late May to tackle the problem at the national level when it passed a new farm bill, but it appears they opted for the status quo instead. It was a show of force for the Big Food lobby, which, according to The Economist, may be more influential than the oil industry (Big Food includes tobacco).

It’s hard to tell whether Pollan’s solution would work, and we may not get to find out anyway, with such political muscle swaying our elected officials.

So what can an ordinary citizen do to influence the outcome of this epidemic when we’re up against the titans of lobbying?

“Citizens can become involved with grassroots advocacy groups to chip away at the food industry’s hold on our politicians and locales, much as they ‘pecked Big Tobacco to death’ initially with smoking bans and restrictions, gradually changing social norms and building political will,” says Yancey.

She says reframing the issue “as addressing the paucity of options rather than controlling people” can help. If you want to get involved, she suggests, protest the pervasiveness of junk food advertising in your community, attend city council and board of supervisor meetings to demand funding for community gardens, and find out what foods schools are offering and advocate for new restrictions or better options.

In the meantime, your own health might best be served by heeding Pollan’s advice, summed up as a simple slogan for his latest book: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Tags: farm subsidies, food, lobbies, los angeles, obesity, public health