Asymmetrical Information

This is an early april fool's post, right?

Yes, Americans are too fat and getting fatter. Yes, your solutions would work. But the cure is worse than the disease. Why should people who are not fat and who can properly regulate their inflow and outflow of calories also have to pay $5 for a coke, $10 for a burger, or exhorbitant taxes on cars or broadband? Let's stick with making the problem-solvers pay for the solution.

Ooops. That should be "make the problem-CAUSERS pay for the solution."

That was exactly the point: that our tepid public health programmes are useless, and more stringent programmes would be worse. I'm not actually suggesting implementing these ideas.

Soooo you want even *more* people to survive to draw Social Security and Medicare checks? We've already made people too damn healthy by discouraging smoking! Keeping them thin and fit will just rupture the system that much sooner (or cause my taxes to go up even more).

Old Age Welfare should be a reward for intelligent health habits. That requires that the government *not* try to force people to adopt those habits or the whole thing collapses (and we don't want *that*, now do we ).

Its not fair that casual smokers, who have a couple on the weekend at the party, still have to pay $7 for a pack of cigarettes ... at least by Caughtya's logic???

There are certain people that have thyroid conditions and what not that really have very little control over thelr weight ... but come on let's be honest ... most of us are just damn lazy.

We have a cultural problem pure and simple ... affluence is biting us in the ass and we need to work through it without getting the government involved or blaming McDonald's ... If I can quit smoking (which I did for like two years) I should also be able to quit going to the Taco Bell Drive thru at 11PM.

Here's my solution: Let natural selection sort it out. If fatties aren't fit to live, they won't live as long as non-fatties or procreate at the same rate as non-fatties. So, if fatness is gene-related, there'll be fewer fatties in succeeding generations. Otherwise, I don't care how fat other people get, as long as I don't have to pay for their food addiction.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that people who smoke tend to keep their weight down.

Has it occurred to you that today's epidemic of overweightness is in part a direct result of the campaign to convince people to give up smoking?

Aside from all of the great "Modest Proposal" points made above, another problem with taxing "fat foods" is that there's really no such thing. Tax up ding-dongs and ho-hos, and folks will get just as fat off of french bread and organic jam.

Energy densities come at just two levels: 9 calories/gram for fat, and 4 calories/gram for protein and carbohydrates. Unless folks are prepared to implement an energy density tax, the result will merely be taxing things that seem to be eated by poor people ("soda? How gauche! Big Macs? Uggh...please pass the wine and gouda, please...")

Even with an energy density tax, unless folks are prepared to tax cooking oil as a food, folks denied their fat cravings will just end up frying their extra lean, low-tax whatevers.

In thinking about what "works" in such public health campaigns, I wonder if the most important factor might simply be time.

Certainly for smoking, I think it's true that the best way to quit is to never start. So, how much has the decline in smoking come from more poeple quitting, vs. fewer people starting? If the latter was a significant factor, then maybe one key was simply decades of anti-smoking messaging, leading to fewer smokers in the next generation.

The same could be true for obesity. The things that are being done now may well have little impact on people who already have weight problems. But they might still be extremely valuable if they create a social environment where the next generation is less likely to become "addicted" to the problematic behaviors.

Or not. I'm just speculating, although it seems like data on smoking should help confirm/deny this idea.

As you said 2 posts back:
Good intentions, bad outcomes

When enchiladas are outlawed, only outlaws will have enchiladas

I hate fat people to!!!!!

In an effort to cut down on entitlement costs, I propose that it be made mandatory to be heavily intoxicated when driving on highways between 11 P.M. and 5 A.M, with a minimum speed of 90 m.p.h.. The quickest allowable emergency response time would be four hours, to cut down on trauma room and long term care costs. Just pick up the bodies and clear the wreckage at 2 and 5.

You mention social stigma. I believe that a great deal of the increase in fat people is because of the lack of social stigma--if everyone around you is gaining weight, you can relax and eat more too.

Making obesity go away isn't the only reason for changing the economics of obesity; there's also the little issue of fairness. If fat people's health-care costs are higher, why the hell shouldn't their insurance rates be higher (and others' lower)? If some of that financial cost for their life decisions is paid by the public, why shouldn't the public charge them more in taxes? If they take more space where space costs money, why shouldn't they pay more? Why, in general, should people not pay for the costs they incur?

No, I don't hate fat people. I don't think they're inferior. I do, however, think that failure to address free-rider reduces economic efficiency and perpetuates injustice.

Changing policy to not give such big incentives to low-density housing & commercial patterns would help, but again, political suicide.

One reason for rising obesity that is never discussed is fear.

Back in the '70s (when I was a chubby girl, but nothing like what you see now), my parents worked, and my sibs and I were home by ourselves. My parents weren't terribly worried about crime (granted this was in a Kansas town, population about 50K). We spent the day riding our bikes (sans helmets) all over the surrounding streets with our friends, or at the neighborhood swimming pool (where we'd lay out with baby oil rather than sun block). Hell, we played with lawn darts!

Now, parents are afraid to let their kids play in the front yard because someone might come along and snatch them (and this fear is present in Kansas towns of any size as well as big cities). They're afraid to let them out on a bicycle because they might get hit by a car. They're afraid to send them to the swimming pool because the sunlight is dangerous.

Kids end up in front of the television playing PS2 because even if it's not healthy, it feels safe.

All the soccer practices and tumbling classes can't make up for the lack of unstructured play time.

I recently started commuting to work via the subway. I have to walk about 3/4 mile to and from the metro every day. Plus the exit from the metro is about 2 flights. That doesn't amount to a heck of a lot of exercise but previously my commute consisted of sitting on my butt for 30 minutes. It IS a significant change. If people could just work exercise into their regular lives rather than trying to get 45 minutes of treadmill time every day I think they would notice a significant change.

I think most of us agree that the iron hand of government should not be in the business of coercing adults to live healthier lives. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" includes the right to shorten your life by exercising your liberty to gorge on junk food, if that's what makes you happy. Personal responsibility is a concomitant of freedom.

However, we don't grant nearly the same liberties to minors that we do to adults. For example, I don't recall having the option of not attending high school, and I also don't recall having much say in the curriculum. However, I DO recall being allowed to eat all sorts of crap and lead a completely sedentary existence. Gym class was a complete joke, emphasizing team sports like floor hockey and touch football, where the less athletic among us could spend most of the time hanging out on the periphery while others carried the team. I was a disgusting blob, devoid of self-esteem and on the path to a massive heart attack sometime in my forties, until I discovered running at age 16 and dropped about 40-50 lbs. within a few months.

If we can legislate that kids must learn what a sonnet is and how to calculate the area of a circle, why can't we legislate that they aren't allowed to have junk food on school grounds, and must get half an hour of vigorous aerobic exercise every day? We can't and shouldn't be telling adults how to live their lives, but at least we can try to set kids on the right path during the years when most lifelong habits are formed.

If some of that financial cost for their life decisions is paid by the public, why shouldn't the public charge them more in taxes?...Why, in general, should people not pay for the costs they incur?

Oh, goody! I love it when people advance these arguments. There's a long slippery slope to go down, but it always ends at reproduction. Tax breeding! Parents pay higher taxes for each child! After all, there's not only the care of the child, there's the care of the mother during pregnancy, plus any damages to society that the child might inflict (e.g. drug abuse, vandalism, murder, obesity, and other crimes).

I am always up for taxing, banning, criminalizing, or otherwise discouraging an activity in which I have no intention of participating.

Better yet, license it! Permits required to have children, and yes, the criteria -- financial, psychological, biological -- will be strict, and violators punished severely. Platypus's application is denied.

I have a 4 letter cure for obesity - METH. Ever seen a fatty on crank?

John

God save us from the do gooders.

Social Stigma?

Overweight people are the most stigmatized group in America, and they're the only group that it's socially ok to put down without any feelings of remorse (ok well smokers too but they get bitter at you)...

As for incentives, we're talking about entire lifestyle issues: we have long commutes from suburbs, we're rushed for time and so on... you can't attakc the eating angle without looking at a slew of other things that makes us different from other countries

These arn't easy issues to incentivize (god that fetish) incentives are more difficult applying than proscribing... do you put a fat tax on all foods with fat content, fast foods or what?
don't forget that unhealthy eating is somehting associated with poorer people too.

Has it occurred to you that today's epidemic of overweightness is in part a direct result of the campaign to convince people to give up smoking?

"In part" makes this pretty hard to negate on any level, but I can tell you that I don't think lower rates of smoking play any significant role in the big increase in childhood obesity.

Damn you, Steven Den Beste, I was going to go there.

though, I've gotta admit, I'd really love to see how closely those two trends correlate.....

Ah yes, social pressure is doing real well in white upper middle class. Nothing builds character like a spell of anorexia or bulimia.

However, as I'm now back in shape, I would favor heavy insurance penalties for over- and underweight people (and smokers as well (but not drinkers, thank you very much)).

Public health officials: stop paying attention to weight and start talking about fitness. Cardiovascular fitness, muscular fitness, etc. Weight, not a great indicator, there are myriad ways to get skinny, there's only one way to get fit: work at it.

Unfit folks (AKA Fat, unattractive slobs): start getting some exercise. Yeah, okay some of us don't have to work too terribly hard to remain thin, how does that make your life worse? Doesn't change the underlying reality. Tough if it isn't fair: some people are way better at math than I am, does that change what it takes for me to learn math? Nope. Some people are naturally more fit than others, does that change how hard any of the unlucky ones have to work to stay fit? Not at all. Quit whining, start working. Or don't, and die sooner than the rest of us, I don't much care really.

The fact is, some folks have messed up blood sugar issues and get fat real easy. Others don't. Controlling your blood sugar is key to getting slim and staying that way.

If I eat 2 cookies a day after lunch for 3 weeks I'll gain 2 lbs., but I only ate a half-pound of cookies! Counting calories and working out is just smart business, but those of you on your high horses about how that's all these fat bastards need to do is put down the Big Mac and go jogging are clueless.

Your body was made to run at peak efficiency given varying caloric intake. Give it lots of food and it will burn lots of food. Starve it and it will slow down. Feed it sugars and refined starches and it will store fat.

But just don't tell anybody else--I'm going to be The Cock at the Early Bird specials.

Why not just adjust our income tax to our BMI? I would go for that.

I think the answer is more about lack of exercise than eating too much food. We had McDonalds back when I was a kid in the 1960's too. And I hung out there a lot because my girlfriend worked there. Didn't make me fat.

On the other hand, I practically lived on my bike as a kid. We played all sorts of outdoor games and climbed trees and I don't know what all. In the summer, there was baseball practice and during the school year PE was manditory all the way through high school.

We just moved around more back then.

Rob -- McDonald's was around in the '60s, but the portion sizes have increased since then. The Big Mac was introduced sometime in the '70s. There was only one size of french fries, and that was what is now a small. Drink sizes were smaller too.

Most Americans have no idea how many calories they (or their kids) consume in a day, or how many calories are in that great salad at Flinger's. Restaurants make high-cal foods on purpose; because fat and sugar taste good. And if they can put a bed of iceberg lettuce under the bacon and sour cream to reduce your guilt, they can sell even more.

When you prepare food at home, you know how much sugar or shortening or butter is going into your recipes. This is why Alton Brown (of Food-TV's "Good Eats") says never eat anything prepared by someone you wouldn't hug.

Having said all that, I agree with you, Rob, that exercise is the key. The time in my life that I was at my best weight, I was not dieting. I was exercising 1.5 hours a day, 5-6 days a week (oh, the days before private practice).

Funny thing is, though, I also ate better than any other time of my life. It was not by design. Healthier food just sounded good to me, and junk didn't seem so appealing.

What's really funny is how so many of these people think abstinence programs don't work for sex, but do work for food. If we can't repress a drive for an optional activity, how are we supposed to repress a drive for an activity necessary for survival?

Spongeworthy, your math is incorrect.

1 gram of fat contains 9 calories or approximately 255 calories in 1oz.

It takes approximately 3500 excess calories to increase your weight by 1lb.

If calculated at 100% fat you would need to consume approximately 27oz of cookies to gain 2lbs of weight, not the 8oz you cite.

But I say, They can have my Porterhouse when they pry it from my dead cold artery clogged
hands.

Jane,

Sometimes your economic background really shows.

If we're talking about programs that will reduce fat without respect to liberty (or much in the way of morality), why go with fines?

Daily beatings would almost certainly prove more effective than tax hikes on non-diet soda, plus provide public health benefits in the way of stress relief for the beaters (I assume that we wouldn't need to pay them past the satisfaction of relieving their frustration on their assigned obese person). Not to mention that beating someone is cardiovascular exercise if you keep the tempo up.

(note: I'm not in any way implying that you mean we should do these things -- it's obvious that your point is that any workable solution is immoral -- I just think it's funny how you instinctively reach for economic solutions when more conventional solutions might be more effective and easier to implement.)

(Incidentally, a more straightforward solution, I think, would be a $.01/Calorie tax on all food -- much simpler to implement and wouldn't require pesky government beaurocracy imposing its dislike of pepsi despite its love for fois gras on the populace.)

Incidentally, another advantage of the daily beatings for obese people approach is that the government could put up signs saying, "Fat makes you unhappy. The beatings will continue until morale improves." :-)

In high school I ate roughly 3-4 times the recommended 2000 calories. Usually I ate somewhere between 6000 and 8000 calories a day, my highest weight was 145 (I'm 5'10"). How did I achieve this miracle? Running. Running the mile in 5:00 minutes (a typical time in practice for me) burns ~2100 calories.

Granted, most folks aren't going to be able to do that, but you don't start there. You start with "Dang, I'm going to run a mile today." And you build, and some days you do longer slow runs, and some days you do sprints, etc. All you need is an $80 pair of running shoes a few times a year and a $6 watch. And, yeah, you're going to have to spend that much on shoes if you don't want knee and back problems. Buy the cheapest digital watch you can find, though, those things are disposable.

Jane,

Great piece, thanks, though I think your smoking comparison breaks down quickly -- one doesn't *have* to smoke. I'd like to chime in with a part-time cook's perspective.

French people don't know how many calories they're eating either -- and probably care even less than we do. Portion sizes matter here, yes, but I think something more insidious is at work and it works against your "have the government tax the bejeezus out of it" angle.

It's eating junk -- and I'm *not* just talking McD's & Co. The *real* culprits are fake cheese, "Lean" Cuisine, sugar cereals and corn syruped-everything. We don't eat *real* food: unprocessed veg, meat (yes, meat!), poultry and fish you have to *prepare*, not microwave. I can't count the number of fatties I've seen who mainline massive portions of "low calorie" dreck.

And who's shoehorning us into this? Partly our time-starved lifestyles, but I lay most of the blame at the feet of those wonderful "incentivizers" at the FDA: now that salt, eggs, meat of any kind, and don't-get-me-started-on-fat are off-limits, we're marching to the nuker with our Stouffer's pizzas. And getting huge. Apparently eating a little less, but eating *well* is beyond the government marketers. Or nutritionists.

The recent meteoric rise of organic markets (e.g., Whole Foods) gives me hope. If we just get back to eating the Real Deal and ducking the scare-mongerers I expect we'll be fine.

Timothy -- I suspect you mean: running 5-minute miles for an hour (i.e. running 12 miles) burns ~2100 calories. Otherwise, you burn roughly the same amount of calories whether you run a mile or walk a mile, with running burning slightly more because it is a less efficient means of travel than walking.

I suspect you actually achieved your "miracle" the same why I did -- you were young. I was also a skinny beanpole desperate to put on weight (5'10", 130 lbs. in my freshman year in college). I went through a spell where I ate three cheeseburgers at every meal (9 burgers/day!) but after doing that for a while I could only get up to ~140. Ultimately I just couldn't consume that much food consistently and I gave up, going back down to 130 in a few weeks.

I've maintained consistent eating patterns over the years, but about 3 years ago, at 30, the pounds started piling on and I'm now up to a relatively healthy 160. The only thing I did that changed is get older.

Spongeworthy writes. "If I eat 2 cookies a day after lunch for 3 weeks I'll gain 2 lbs., but I only ate a half-pound of cookies!"

What you suggest is not possible, even with a theoretically 'perfectly efficient' metabolism.

E.g. 0.5 lbs chocolate chip cookies = approx. 1523 calories. It takes approx. 3500 cal in excess to gain a pound. Therefore 0.5 pounds of cookies = 0.43 pounds gained. In fact, 1/2 pound of pure butter can only get you 0.65 lbs fatter.

While is untrue that the "type" of calories you eat affects your metabolism in any significant way, it can affect your appetite (which is where the other pounds come in.) But a calorie is just a calorie, whether it comes from butter, bread or broccoli. So literally, all you really need to do is "put down the Big Mac and go jogging." The problem is that it is so much easier to spend 5 minutes eating a 570 cal Big Mac than it is to jog the 46 min* required to burn it off.

*(assuming a 160# person, 6mph).

My grandfather worked the same number of hours that I do (about 65 hours a week, on average), but the type of work is quite different. He WORKED -- lifted heavy things, pounded nails, used a non-power saw, etc. I sit in my office and occasionally walk (briskly) down the hall to another office. How can my half hour on the treadmill possibly keep me in the same shape as my grandpa? It can't. There is not enough time in the day for me to do my office work AND exercise enough for me to be in the kind of shape my genetics make me capable of.

What we need is a way to combine the two, work and exercise. Here's my proposal: Commercial buildings should be limited in the electricity they can consume. Office buildings, for example, should have just enough juice to run the lights and the hand dryers in the bathrooms. Want to use your computer? Start cranking the manual generator! You quit pumping the pedals and microwave won't work. This one modest proposal should get us in shape pretty darn quick!

I think regular exercise is the best change an overweight person can make. I would suggest resistance training of some sort. The more muscle you have the higher your basal metabolic rate. So you will not only burn calories while exercising, you will also burn calories at a higher rate when at rest. But if your exercising more for aesthics then health you are going to have to restrict your diet.

John is on the right track:

Jimmy Tango's Fatbusters.

Ride the snake, friends.

A breakdown by ethnicity would be interesting. Many immigrant groups are not prepared for the large amount of calorie-dense food that is available wherever one looks. Certainly there are ethnic groups whose members are typically thin and other ethnic groups where obesity is more common.

Not to get TOO serious, here, but I think I see what everybody's missing. If you want to talk about perverse incentives, why not discuss agriculture subsidies?

If you want to reduce obesity, stop artificially supporting cheap milk (and cheese) producers. Don't make it easier for bakers to use refined cane sugar than honey.

One principal reason so many more people are fat than heretofore is that fat-making foods are so much cheaper than the good stuff.

So ... um ... level out the playing field. Stop using tax dollars to make the crap food so cheap.

M

Running the mile in 5:00 minutes (a typical time in practice for me) burns ~2100 calories

Timothy -- I suspect you mean: running 5-minute miles for an hour (i.e. running 12 miles) burns ~2100 calories.

You're both wrong. No human being can burn 2100 calories in 5 minutes, and only a very large person will manage to burn 2100 calories while lumbering through 12 miles.

An average person (something like 150 lbs.) running at an average pace (say, 8-minute miles) will burn about 100 calories per mile. This will obviously be more for heavier runners, and it also depends a bit on the individual's pace and biomechanical efficiency. Nevertheless, 100 calories per mile is a good rule of thumb.

If losing weight was nothing more than a matter of simple caloric arithmetic (calories burned - calories ingested = fat lost), you would need to run 36 miles in order to lose a pound of fat (actually, it's even worse, because your body’s primary fuel source is not fat but glycogen, which is stored directly in muscle tissue as well as in the liver). However, in my experience fat loss is only a matter of simple caloric arithmetic if you are already physically fit; as someone who runs a lot of road races from 5k to the marathon, increasing my weekly training mileage from ~40 to ~80 miles seems to only result in losing about ½-1 lb. per week, if my food consumption remains the same.

But it's a totally different story for someone who is sedentary and out-of-shape. If you go from doing absolutely nothing to running merely a mile or two a day, you are almost guaranteed to start shedding pounds at a rate much greater than the 700-1500 calories which your weekly mileage could directly account for. Part of it might be accounted for by the fact that your appetite decreases. Another factor is that exercise increases your basal metabolic rate, but recent studies show this to be less of a factor than was once thought. More than anything, I think exercise triggers hormonal signals that tell your fat cells to store less fat. In any case, as far as staying lean is concerned, there is a greater difference between doing nothing and running 20 minutes per day than there is between running 20 minutes and running 2 hours. That’s my experience, anyway. I’m sure the same is true of swimming and cycling.

NO FAT CHICKS....

um... the Big Mac is the fix for socialist
security. by making us fat and die younger,
the retirement system will start working again.

HA!!! 18.7 BMI. I Win!

This article http://www.nber.org/digest/feb03/w9247.html
puts the blame on women working outside the home as the underlying cause. That is, working women have no time to cook home cooked meals so their families either eat fast food or processed food. Most of what people buy at the supermarket now is not food, but "food products."

The lack of social stigma is also a real cause. In the book "French Women Don't Get Fat," the author relates her story of coming home from a year in America and her father's first words being "you look like a sack of potatoes." Her intended point was that eating in America makes you gain weight. What I noticed is that her father rather than saying "wonderful to see you" says, basically, "you look fat." The French simply care more about appearance than we do. This lowers the cost of being fat, as Jane rightly points out.

There are two sides to the calories/exercise balance. One is "exercise more." The other is "eat less."

Some of us have difficulty with "exercise more." I have some disability issues that affect exercise; I can't run, I can't climb stairs, I can't swim. (Details not significant.)

However, nothing prevents "eat less." After a serious health-care scare a bit over two years ago - "pre-diabetic" - I implemented Linda's patented eat-less diet, and lost about 50 pounds in two years.

I didn't change the content of my diet at all; just how much of it I ate. In fact, junk food played a significant favorable role, in that I stopped buying lunch at the company cafeteria and instead brought calorie-controlled microwaveable meals rather than buying the daily cafeteria special with its padded charge for fries and soft drinks.

I read somewhere recently that the difference between maintaining weight and gaining it is on average about 100 calories a day. It doesn't take a huge amount of self-control to cut back that much.

It does, of course, require sufficient intelligence to understand why it matters.

The proposed tax on power lawnmowers presumes that people use them out of pure laziness, and could get by quite nicely with a push mower. I invite anyone who believes that of me to come mow my 75' x 200' corner lot. The flat portion is 2' above the sidewalk with a 30 degree slope. When you finish there, you can walk 3 blocks to my other property, also a corner lot, but smaller. The entire side lawn, except for 3 passes along the top, is a 4'' high 45 degree slope. Rest assured that I am burning calories pushing my gas mower.

> Encourage health and life insurance companies to jack up their premiums.

Surely Galt isn't suggesting that the obese subsidize the non-obese. How is she going to force them to do so? (If the obese think that insurance is a bad deal, they won't buy.)

If she really thinks that the subsidy runs the other way, she should start an insurance company and set her rates accordingly. If she's right, other companies will either adjust their rates or lose their profitable customers. If she's wrong, well, shouldn't she lose her money for misjudging the actual risk?

> I do, however, think that failure to address free-rider reduces economic efficiency and perpetuates injustice.

What free-rider problem?

To the extent that fat people are less productive, it's quite legal to pay them less. Surely no one is advocating penalizing them beyond that.... If so, on what basis?

Contrary to popular belief, people don't "owe" full productivity. They owe what they're paid for.

Yes, overeating is slow and uncertain suicide. Why is that objectionable? If they'd rather die than hang around, is that their problem or ours?

There are already a fairly good set of incentives to lose weight (at a minimum, health and stigma), and yet people aren't losing weight. So I wonder if it's significantly harder to lose weight than to simply stay thin. Which in turn makes me wonder if ciggs/day went down because people quit or b/c people died and the rate at which new smokers were traditionally added has died down.

One of the most surreal experiences I've ever
had occurred at my brother's college graduation
a couple of years ago. After the ceremony, my husband and I were standing outside having cigarettes while we waited for my brother. A complete stranger, an absolutely titanic fat man (must have been at least 150 pounds overweight) came over to us and explained that we ought to quit smoking, because he used to be a smoker and had recently had quadruple bypass surgery. In our complete astonishment and habitual politeness, we just mumbled something and excused ourselves.

Neither my husband nor myself are overweight.
I still regret not saying something to the man about the beam in his own eye.

How many of your readers/commenters, I wonder, did what I was sorely tempted to do...alternate between despair at losing one of our favorite bloggers to the dark side and mirth at a funny April Fools joke, right up until those last two paragraphs?

There are altogether too many people in this society who wouldn't feel that the examples in your post were unacceptable at all. I daily feel the urge to scream at such people at the top of my lungs that, unless they have some morally legitimate claim to my personal productivity, it remains none of their goddamned business how healthy I am or am not.

Fat is not contagious. (Neither, for that matter, is smoking.) If the fat on one person's body could attach itself to another person and make them sick, then there might be some legitimate public health interest in obesity.

But no, what we're actually doing is dressing up religious asceticism as public policy.

Oh, goody! I love it when people advance these arguments. There's a long slippery slope

You love getting the chance to look like an idiot by basing your counterargument on a fallacy? How odd. There are important distinctions to be made between cases where society should try to recover a cost and where it should absorb that cost as a public good. An educated populace benefits society, so it's justifiable for society to bear part of the cost for education. An obese populace does not benefit society, so that justification disappears. That slope is nowhere near as slippery as you make it out to be.

Permits required to have children, and yes, the criteria -- financial, psychological, biological -- will be strict, and violators punished severely. Platypus's application is denied.

Too late. I already have a daughter who, at a mere ten months, seems to have more common sense (and certainly has a more pleasant disposition) than some of the people I see commenting on blogs.

Here's one more possible contributor to fatness: lack of sleep. There've been a couple studies suggesting that running low on sleep causes insulin resistance (this was a short-term study, though) and carb cravings.

Platypus writes:

I already have a daughter...

Unlicensed offspring will be removed from the home, and violators forcibly sterilized.

While you're traipsing through the logic pages, why don't you look up reductio ad absurdam. What I said follows naturally from your words, which I quoted above. Here there are again:

If some of that financial cost for their life decisions is paid by the public, why shouldn't the public charge them more in taxes?...Why, in general, should people not pay for the costs they incur?

Perhaps you think we should wait until someone's little precious becomes diseased, violent, addicted or (horrors!) overweight before assessing the penalty. But by that time it may be too late. No, better to simply prohibit all unauthorized breeding.

And to think, right now you're getting a tax deduction!

Fat is not contagious. (Neither, for that matter, is smoking.)

Actually, there is such a thing as second-hand smoke, and if a society of overweight people lowers the stigma on being overweight yourself, there may very well be such a thing as second-hand fat.

That aside, I'm surprised the folks advocating a society of fatties that self-destruct before enjoying an extended stint on Social Security haven't noticed that fatties are more prone to diseases that eat into national budgets elsewhere, including but not limited to Medicare/Medicaid...

While you're traipsing through the logic pages, why don't you look up reductio ad absurdam

That's absurdum, with a u in the second-to-last position, and it doesn't work unless the cited consequences really do follow from premises. Otherwise, as in this case, it's still just a slippery slope.

Interesting comments. What is missing here is that 50 years ago the government took the advice of the dietary scientists of the day - and started a massive campaign against fat. This campaign was very successful - everyone now tries to get low fat foods. The problem is that low fat foods that taste good are far worse than the original high fat foods, because they contain sugar! Eating sugar makes you more hungry, leading to an increase in calories required to satiate yourself. (For confirmation of this, ask any heart surgeon - they know all about this due to their area of expertise) I think the most likely thing to decrease overweight would be to tax food inversely proportional to the calories (perhaps weighing sugar calories as worse do to the hunger effect). But not really practical, unfortunately.

To go off topic for just a bit - this is exactly the same problem I have with global warming. The global warming scientists are looking at the environment and making a conclusion based on very limitted information - and then recommending a political solution with terrible consequences if they are wrong. Scarry stuff!

You should have suggested that smoking helps people lose weight. I thought that's where you were going to go.

Happy April 1.

That's absurdum, with a u in the second-to-last position...

Well-spotted, but a small uptick in your Latin spelling scores will not offset your other demerits. Sorry, no kids for you.

...and it doesn't work unless the cited consequences really do follow from premises. Otherwise, as in this case, it's still just a slippery slope.

Ah, proof by assertion. Most persuasive.

Well-spotted, but a small uptick in your Latin spelling scores will not offset your other demerits.

I normally wouldn't have mentioned it, but you were claiming familiarity with the concept and misspelling something usually indicates a lack of familiarity. It was a rebuttal to a weak form of appeal to authority.

Ah, proof by assertion.

This time your fallacy is shifting the burden of proof. I had already given all the explanation that was necessary one exchange ago; now it's up to you to show how anything I said would lead inevitably to the absurd consequences you mention. Stop relying on sheer repetition and unpleasantness, and learn how to make a real argument. In short, grow up.

I could put this either here or in the 250 and counting gay marriage post.

I'm sorry to have to break it to everyone, but this one is the fault of feminism. Married women no longer identifying ourselves with the state of our homes and our families has a multitude of dire consequences, and this is just the most aesthetically offensive. Dual career families make for fat kids. We've got two choices here: mothers can get our asses back in the kitchen, or we can have massive state control over private life. Oh you think we have that already? Just wait until people start calling CPS on their neighbors for too many trips to Micky D's.

Oh, I'm sorry, did I hear someone say they don't see why dads can't pick up the slack for working moms? Well, I don't see why either, but I also see that isn't happening and hasn't been happening for 30 years. I'm not willing to sacrifice my children to ideology. Home cooked meals by a mom who can watch the street where her children play are the easiest and best answers.

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