Last week’s New Yorker contained a revealing article by Elizabeth Kolbert about the forces behind the scenes that are contributing to obesity in the U.S. Here’s an excerpt, which points to cheap food as one of the factors that has made us a nation of chubbies:

“Relative to other goods and services, food has got cheaper in the past few decades, and fattening foods, in particular, have become a bargain. Between 1983 and 2005, the real cost of fats and oils declined by sixteen per cent. During the same period, the real cost of soft drinks dropped by more than twenty per cent.”

Even scarier is former FDA commissioner David Kessler’s point of view that food processors have created so many foods with high concentrations of fat, sugar and salt that we’ve now crave them in ever-increasing quantities. Thanks to Kolbert for this illuminating piece, which should make all of us want to eat lower on the food chain.