It is true that govt policies have led to the replacement of sugar with corn syrup. If corn syrup was the cause of all our problems then the libertarian has an easy answer. End the corn syrup bias (subsidies and foreign sugar tariffs) and we’ll go back to more sugar.
However, I really doubt sugar is that much better than corn syrup. In the end, a calorie is a calorie and you’ll still gain weight with sugar.
My policy idea is better because it doesn’t ignore the problem but it also doesn’t punish people who choose high calorie food. It rewards people for real results. Health care costs will go down and we won’t have all these calls for govt health care.
One thing about the health problem is I think we have to attack it on many fronts. Supply side, demand side, incentives, etc.. I think your bmi idea would be hard to implement(for example for all these I think we need more doctors or Nurse Physicians and co, so we can spend real time with each person)... but I think you are onto something with working on the `carrot` ;) side of the equation, instead of the stick we usually use. Like taxes on cigarettes.
One possiblity is food stamps. A great number of children their families buy groceries on food stamps. Imagine with those you could only buy non-sugar cereal, milk, carrots, apples, `healthy fats`, lettuce etc..
That's the kind of thinking that has gotten our society into this mess.
Fats have more calories than carbs but the body processes the two differently. Carbs are processed rapidly and lead to spikes in blood sugar, which causes weight gain in most people.
Eliminating healthy fats which our ancestors ate in abundance and replacing them with modified fats, unhealthy fats, or carbs has caused most of the health challenges in our society.
That's why many primitive societies (such as found in parts of Africa) are healthier than our modern progressive ones, simply because they are still eating the diet that their ancestors for thousands of years have been eating. Natural selection automatically culls out members of the population that can't survive, and sadly, that is what we are seeing today: lots of natural selection for people who can't survive on the western diet of fast food, low-fat and high-carb junk food, low-nutrition food, unhealthy fats, and no exercise. Those people are not destined to poor health because of their genetics, they are just eating the wrong diet.
Europeans are generally healthier than Americans because they eat a more traditional diet for their society (anyone who has been to France or Germany will recognize this), not a diet founded on the USDA Food Pyramid, heavily weighted toward grains and starches.
There's lots of research on the subject here: Weston A. Price Foundation