Today’s entree in the Low Bull Diet is a bitter bite of truth bound to stick in many craws; that while the excess pounds may be only on the overweight, the blame for the fattening of America belongs to us all. It is easy to fault the 60 percent of us who are overweight for the extra pounds because only we can put food in our mouths.

It is tempting, too, because then their extra pounds are their failure and their problem. Blaming overweight Americans entirely for their problem, however, not only fails to accept the collective responsibility the rest of us bear, but leaves us without the collective solutions that are the cornerstone of success in the battle against our national obesity epidemic.

We are a nation that promotes obesity, by government policy and government omission, by ignorance, by food industry and diet industry marketing, by our collective failure to promote health instead of leisure, by allowing the marketing of junk food to our progressively overweight children, by lifestyle, and much, much more. Like the fat, there is plenty of blame to go around.

Take, for example, our schools. We have not only allowed many of them to cut physical education and health education classes, but we allow most schools to sell soda and candy to our children.

That increases students’ access to sugar calories and decreases their ability to burn them off. We do so despite knowing that regular soda is a major contributor to childhood obesity, and that every additional regular soda per day may increase a child’s risk of obesity by 60 percent. School lunch programs are often steeped in high calorie offerings. Fast food companies manage some school lunch programs, which is akin to the fox feeding the hen house, if not guarding it.

We have underfunded research on the complex issue of obesity. Diseases caused by obesity will kill 400,000 Americans this year, AIDS will kill perhaps 35,000, but the National Institute of Health is estimated to spend about six times as much on AIDS research as it does on obesity research.

As a result we understand relatively little about what drives some people to eat too much and exercise too little, and the complex genetic patterns that predispose some to obesity. We know too little about how the body fights weight loss efforts in the overweight.

We know that to keep people lean and healthy they must eat less and get off the couch, but we don’t even know how best to motivate them to do that.

Our federal government has done relatively little to combat the problem, despite the fact we will spend $75 billion this year on the many obesity-related illnesses.

It has failed to limit food industry advertising to children, failed to systematically require nutritional information such as calories and fat content on restaurant menus and, in response to food industry lobbying, has muted its advice to the public regarding healthy eating.

There has been only one U.S. Surgeon General’s report on obesity in the past 30 years, and only recently did the federal government even recognize obesity as an illness. We pay billions in taxpayer dollar subsidies to the American corn and sugar industries, major sources of the excess sugar calories that are fattening our citizens. The government contributes billions to the highway system but little to the development of an America that encourages walking. Most importantly, it has done little to lead us in the war on obesity; if al-Qaida was threatening to attack us with cellulite the story might be different.

For its part the American food industry has systematically plied us with unhealthy food in corpulent amounts, and turned its back on opportunities to educate us about proper diet.

It has resisted efforts to label food in restaurants and supermarket with good nutritional information so that we can make better choices when we choose our food.

The result; you cannot find a restaurant menu that explains to parents that one meal of cheeseburger, fries, and soda may add up to more than half of the calories and all of the fat recommended by the federal government for a child for an entire day. How else is a parent supposed to know that?

The food industry’s marketing practices in many cases are downright deceptive; witness the frequent marketing of high-sugar breakfast cereals as somehow good for children because they can be “part of this nutritious breakfast.”

When criticized for its contribution to our sagging bottom line, the industry has hidden behind the shield of individual responsibility, arguing they just make the food and it is all our fault that we eat too much of it.

On this issue, however, the industry is chewing out of both sides of its mouth; it spends more than $13 billion a year advertising food to children to get them to eat more high-calorie foods, and then blames us when the marketing works.

Even physicians could do better. Fewer than 50 percent of American physicians exercise the five times per week recommended by the Centers for Disease Control, a poor example from the “health” profession.

Maintenance of a healthy weight is the responsibility of individual adults and parents, but we as a nation and as a people are collectively helping more and more of us fail in that responsibility.

Until we accept our collective responsibility, we will not find the collective solutions necessary to end the rapid, deadly, costly fattening of America, and America will just keep eating itself to death.

Erik Steele, D.O. is a physician in Bangor, an administrator at Eastern Maine Medical Center, and is on the staff of several hospital emergency rooms in the region.