Posted on 01/18/2004 11:20:57 PM PST by Dubya
President Bush is going to make the world safe for fat people. This policy has not made headlines in the Democratic primaries, but of all the programmes spewing out of the White House these pre-election months, it is ultimately the most important.
Washington's plump pride initiative pits it against the alliance of the EU, the UN and NGOs who have found another evil for which to blame America and George Bush - a worldwide obesity problem. According to the International Obesity Task Force (an NGO associated with the World Health Organisation), one in three Americans is obese as well as at least 16 per cent of British teenagers, not to mention the remaining 300 million obese people in the world the task force appear to have counted. The world is gorging on American fast food and American gadgetry. They are sitting watching television or playing on computers when they should be exercising; taking lifts instead of the stairs; driving not bicycling. They are getting fat.
This week, the International Obesity Task Force will discuss its new 160-page report, several years in the making. The report dislikes the usual things - sugar, salts, saturated fat, technology and modern farming. It paints a disastrous picture of a world in which children don't go to bed hungry at night: they go to bed too full of fast food and chocolate bars.
This cruel Earth is a planet where we die of cancers, heart disease or diabetes caused or exacerbated by our bad eating habits.
Life, as someone must have said, is a bit of a crap shoot. We all have to die of something and we must be the first generation to want to die in perfect health. But lifespan remains mysterious. There are fat 80-year-olds who stuff themselves with sausages and have more energy and mental acuity than people half their age. There are thin joggers who die prematurely of heart disease and non-smokers who get cancer. Perhaps some diseases can be directly attributed to a specific cause, such as asbestos; still, it all seems a bit doubtful.
Obesity is gearing up as the next great crusade following tobacco. It's a natural for the regulators of the world. Food habits are directly connected to the fertile area of "lifestyle", which lives near Regulatory Paradise.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with trying to do things right: healthy foods and exercise are clearly A Good Thing. Children ought to have proper lunches and not only crisps and Maryland cookies. Serious diseases that are very food-sensitive, such as diabetes, are obviously something to try to prevent - if at all possible. The problem is how to do this.
The anti-obesity crowd is targeting, among other things, advertising of the wrong foods for children. They want extra taxes on foods they consider bad. Hello again to a salt tax. However, there seems to be one obstacle: the Bush administration has questioned the study's science and recommendations. The US government, wrote a spokesman in a 30-page critique, "promotes the view that all foods can be part of a healthy and balanced diet, and supports personal responsibility to choose a diet conducive to individual energy balance, weight control and health". With this, America invoked four words banned in Brussels and UN corridors: "personal responsibility", "individual" and "choose".
The combination provoked "Obesites" into a state of extraordinary anger - caused, one is tempted to say, by too little sugar and too much soy. Neville Rigby of the task force accused the Bush administration of holding such regressive views because of the sugar lobby and the campaign contributions it gives to Republicans. "Effectively," he said, "what we are seeing is an effort to sabotage the whole [WHO] process.''
Looking through the report, one is struck by the presumption of its authors. They quite blithely believe that, as they have people's wellbeing in mind, they naturally have absolute licence to direct the minutest details of their activities. A tyrant of antiquity would not have presumed to micro-manage his subjects' lives the way this lot does. Their report is not simply about food habits. It's not even just an attack on modern culture. It's an attack on the post-paleolithic period. Mankind's first big mis-step was coming off the trees.
The authors don't like "animal-based foods" or "intensive" farming methods. They want "traditional animal husbandry" so as not to "exert greater environmental pressures". They prefer people to go back to "traditional diets" with more legumes and fruit. They would like farmers to market their products "directly to consumers". They want "priority" in urban planning to pedestrians and bicycles. They want breast-feeding. Health food strategies "should explicitly address equality and diminish disparities… this requires a strong role for government". There are plans for alliances and admonitions to avoid "individual industries that may wish to capitalize on change for their own benefit". I suppose these people may have some technical interest in food but only as a tool for social engineering.
Sometimes fashions of the times collide. The children's rights lobby cut down sports under the rubric of disliking competition and enabling children to make their own decisions. The obesity lobby wants to make physical activity for children compulsory again. They will have to fight it out - which is in itself a "traditional" activity and certainly calorically healthy. Meanwhile, people simply can't be allowed to go on enjoying their big portions of meat and the convenience of fast pre-packaged foods. In the words of the report, we need "a surveillance system" and "effective interventions" "to change people's behaviour".
Interpreting the report is not difficult. A return to the hunting and gathering society may not be possible but it is the shimmering ideal. If the 19th-century American slogan was "Go west, young man," the 21st's obesity/environmentalist credo can be summed up as "back to the stone age".'
Watching Mr Rigby on the BBC World News, which was suitably outraged by America's response to his report, one could see the divide. We may be eliminating poverty, hunger and dirt, but progress obviously creates other issues. We have problems of industrial pollution, high energy consumption, education, traffic congestion, obesity, you name it. But all of this could be solved if only we could get rid of the notion of liberty. There's the rub. At the bottom of all that pains the UN, the EU and the NGOs is this damnable problem of people free to choose their own books, music, food, activities and lifestyles.
That's why the American response to the task force is so important - they are on the other side of the divide, supporting free choice. And somewhere, one hopes, between the mad libertarians who would eliminate traffic lights and these lifestyle commissars who would eliminate traffic, there must be an equilibrium.
As an interim measure, the EU will outlaw sugar and fat people. If that doesn't work, there is always the next step. We can go back to that great European practice of the Middle Ages - famine. There is nothing in the world that a good dose of "traditional" European undernourishment couldn't cure.
LOL, that's a keeper.
An insight into the Eurobrain. They think that this is how the US works because they know that Europe works that way. They assume that the same kind of corruption is present everywhere. America is not as democratic as it could be, but it's significantly more democratic than the countries of the EU. Very few Europeans understand this.
Whip a couple of anecdotes on us and we are suppose to believe that problems with obesity are overblown. What an ass! Obesity is only starting to emerge as the cause of many medical problems. If unchecked obesity will be the number one cause of rising health care costs. My wife, who is a nurse, comes home every day from the hospital and tells me about patients who are so big it takes 4 people to turn them. She told me about one patient who is so obese that the albumen in his/her system can no longer hold the fluid in and the patient is leaking fluids internally. Nothing can be done to stop it. Most of her patients on the acute floors are obese. If you want to be fat go ahead. But don't cry when there is nothing that can be done for you because there is not anything that can be done for you.
Sorry. For the Government to tell me what I can and cannot eat is over the top.
It should only be a matter of time until overweight people with health problems start getting lawsuits against food industries "settled" to avoid litigation. Next a jury somewhere will find in favor of an overweight plaintiff, out of some misguided sympathy or "deep pocket" syndrome. Next a major jury award to a broad (no pun intended) class of people in a class action suit. Finally, a law that rides the crest of popular political correctness into control of some aspect of public life that deals with eating, and removes more choice from hominus populus.
So goes personal responsibility. It happened with smoking, it's in progress with food. Tobacco companies fell because they pumped the nicotine levels and made their product "more addictive". The food industry will fall because they pumped the fat levels, or the salt levels, or the sugar levels, or something else that's "bad for you" and made their foods "more addictive" to an overeater.
The lawyers went after smokers and the tobacco industry, and the non-smokers cheered. The next target will be the overweight people and the food industry, and another section of people will cheer. Next . . .
It makes me think of Martin Niemoller's poem about the Holocaust.
Why? They are already telling you where you can and cannot smoke, even if it takes away a private property owner's rights.
Aw, c'mon--it's just a little bitty piece of liberty they're talking about anyway, right? You won't miss it much. </ disgust at government intrusion>
That's one of the reasons why we so baldly need tort reform! If a person's own lifestyle is the cause for their obesity, its not McDonald's fault, its their own. They deserve no compensation.
You don't have to look too hard to find some control freak being offended by something (too much fat, too much cholesterol, too much sugar, too many carbs ...) I say too many busy-bodies.
Why did it take that to get you there?
To which I say, "Amen!"
I reject that premise .. and before you assume, no, I'm not overweight. I eat a sensible diet and exercise, but there are times when I do like a Fettuccine Alfredo and a big piece of chocolate cake. The control freaks would deny me this.
I've known people who did everything right, only to die of diseases/events that were totally unrelated to lifestyle.
Yes, as a matter of fact I do. And old friend of mine and she is significantly over weight. So what do you propose, -- have a scale at every restaurant, so when she walks in to eat, before she is assigned her table, she must weigh-in so the control freaks at the restaurant can decide what she can and cannot eat and from what menu she can have?
I knew another who had Type II diabetes, who was also very overweight and recently passed away. It wasn't the diabetes that killed her, or her weight. It was the drunk driver that hit her head on.
And I submit that you it is impossible to quantify "bad behavior" in this context. Every once in a while I like a piece of chocolate cake. So do my premiums go up during those times when I have a slice? Will they do down during those times when I don't have any?
And who determines what's "bad"?
So if you want to raise the premiums on those who are overweight with type II diabetes, do you intend to refund the money on those whose death was not related to life style at all?
What about the poor premature babies that have every manner of health problem associated with their birth -- do we just ignore them?
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