March 13, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:A new study shows that
A new study shows that obesity is worse for health than smoking or drinking, raising a person’s healthcare costs by 36% and medication costs by 77%.
I find this interesting for two reasons. First, because, as the article points out, advocates are much less vocal about smoking and drinking than they are about obesity, even though an astounding 61% of Americans are overweight or obese, at least according to this article. I wonder whether this is because they know they'll get shot down if they even try to enact the kind of puritan legislation that has effectively banned smoking in many places, or because obesity is harder to address.
The other reason that I find this interesting is that with the amazing popularity of Fast Food Nation, which in essence accuses the fast food industry of manipulating consumers to make them fat, not to mention quack weight loss nostrums, I think we're going to see more activism on this front. While I haven't read the book, I've read his article in The Atlantic and seen him on television, and his thesis seems to be that our weight problem isn't our fault -- it's the fault of the fast food industry, which manipulates us to eat enormous portions of unhealthy food.
I find it ultimately unconvincing, although as I say, the argument may be more subtle in the book. On television, he tells us that portions get larger and larger -- which is true -- without pointing out that the reason this is so is that consumers like them that way. While I agree that portion size has something to do with our current epidemic of obesity -- people tend to eat what they're given, rather than stopping when they're full -- all those fast food places have smaller portions on the menu. People choose the supersize double-quarterpounder meals.
The anti-fat crusaders will be fighting something even more powerful than nicotine addiction: a billion years of evolution. We crave fat and sugar because in a scarcity environment, they are the most intense source of energy. This is not news to anyone.
But with Fast Food Nation, we've taken the first step towards a public health crusade: offloading the blame from individuals onto corporations.
When I started smoking, cigarettes cost $1.30 a pack. When I quit, almost 3 years ago, they were near $4.00. Now they're $5.00 a pack or more in New York. Unsurprisingly, when you raise the price of somthing, people demand less of it, which has given the states a nasty surprise as money from the tobacco settlement begins to dry up. This was a major triumph for anti-smoking forces, and was apparently a driving force behind the lawsuits -- forcing behavior changes with a price increase that they never could have gotten legislatively.
This is not the only way in which the anti-tobacco activists have curtailed smoking, of course; by curtailing where we can smoke, they've made it much less attractive to do so. The important point is that successful strategies work on a macro level. Efforts to change individual behavior through advertising, insurance premiums, and the like have been much less effective. And efforts which target businesses start with the declaration that undesirable behavior is the responsibility of someone other than the person engaging in it.
So I think that studies like this, and books like Fast Food Nation, and groups like The Center for Science in the Public Interest (one of the many activist offspring of my beloved beloved Ralph Nader) are paving the way for an assault on the fast food industry as a proxy for our poor eating habits and worse exercise regimes. Perhaps it will make us healthier, although I doubt it. But even if it does, I’m still against this “by any means necessary” approach to changing people’s lives for their own alleged good by stealthily abrogating their freedom of choice.
Posted by Jane Galt at March 13, 2002 10:49 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links