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September
2003
Keeping Fit for
a Lifetime
Kraft Foods says it will clean up its marketing and nutrition
acts. Some restaurant chains are putting calorie values on their
menus, so maybe instead of those little hearts next to the chef
salad and skinless chicken entrees, we will soon see an icon of
a truck scale.
The surgeon
general, the NIH director, the CDC director and the FDA commissioner
have
been touring the nation with an anti-obesity
message, but as appointees of the most deregulatory-minded administration
in history, their message is “watch what you eat, not what
we do.”
Of course
one’s
weight results largely from the many choices an individual makes
in the course of the day. The orange juice
or the soda? The bus or the bike? But those choices are powerfully
influenced by the availability of options and incentives.
For example,
the president’s own state of Texas just restricted
sodas and snack foods in school vending machines, and the FDA has
ordered food manufacturers to put information about trans fatty
acids on their labels — indications that we may finally have
reached a tipping point, so to speak, in the war against fat.
Largely successful
against smoking, public health advocates are now on the verge
of getting
people, if not moving, then at least
thinking about losing weight. Some of the same legal strategies
from the tobacco wars may apply in this fight, but only to a point.
A person can always stop smoking. Unless you are a monk or a cover
girl, you cannot stop eating. You can go cold turkey from cigarettes,
but if you’re overweight all you can do is eat cold turkey.
There are
no easy answers. A New York Times columnist suggested an appropriately
named “lump-sum tax” that
would operate by taking $100 from every American and returning
$250 to each one
who shows up at a government office not overweight.
This is a
regressive tax plan that falls of its own weight because nearly
half of
Americans don’t even have to pay taxes now,
including 76 million children. Besides, much of the nation’s
obesity is directly associated with poverty, thus denying equality
in a system that would reward both the healthy and the wealthy.
This idea
by business columnist Daniel Altman proposes that “anyone
who wanted to could go to an existing government office for a simple
series of measurements.” Has this man ever tried to get a
passport, or a driver’s license?
The government
can’t collect taxes from the fattest cats
in corporate America, and it can’t find weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq, so how could it even begin the destruction of mass here
at home? What government can do, and has not, is direct research
money to not only the biology of obesity but also to the psychology
of it. After all, if you give a man an Oreo, you feed him for a
day. If you teach him how to eat broccoli you keep him fit for
a lifetime.
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