Obesity epidemic calls for measures like tobacco war

JWR ^ | 4-18-05 | Morton Kondracke

[ladyjane]

What I don't get is all the obese smokers!!!!!!

And they all park in handicapped parking spots.

[monday]

"Wouldn't you agree that there is a problem with overweight people often being unwilling to accept responsibility for their state?"

No. I couldn't care less if overweight people accept responsibility for their state. lol

[Inwoodian]

Who the **** is Mort Kondracke to tell me I can't have a double meat cheeseburger and fries with gravy if I want. I don't know him, never met him yet he thinks he should dictate my diet. These Coercive Utopians never give up. They just regroup and bully again. Someone please tell Mor-ton and his pantywaist totalitarians that The Volstead Act was repealed. Go crochet somewhere, you twit.

[Mears]

"In the meantime, life insurance companies do charge an average of 25 percent higher premiums when would-be policyholders are 30 percent or more overweight.


On the other hand, smokers customarily are charged 75 percent to 100 percent higher premiums than nonsmokers, even though obesity presents a risk just as great as smoking."

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It's all about money,period!

[WV Mountain Mama]

And don't be like the mother who bought her daughter fast food every night because she didn't have time to cook dinner, then turn around and sue the fast food companies because the daughter is fat!

[tioga]

Ask the EMTs if they're having to carry more obese people.

Oh, yes!

[Serb5150]

No. I couldn't care less if overweight people accept responsibility for their state. lol

I think you might start caring if it caused your healthcare premiums to increase.

[-YYZ-]

I rarely bother with cigarettes if I'm curled up with a good book - but can wipe out a can of peanuts or a bag of chips without even realizing it.

The trick to that is not to sit down with a container of snack foods, but to serve yourself out a reasonable portion. When I'm having some nuts or even potato chips (I try not to eat those too often, although the vending machine 50 ft away from my cubicle is a constant temptation, LOL), I get a bowl - a small pyrex glass bowl for nuts, a smallish pottery bowl for chips - and dole myself out a reasonable portion. If I go back for more, it is a concious decision.

I've porked up a bit in the last couple of years, and I think it has to do letting myself indulge my taste for fast food a little too often. Also the lack of activity for a couple of months this winter after I broke my collarbone skiing.

[monday]

What possible connection does fat peoples acceptance of their responsibility for being fat, have to do with health care costs?

You aren't going to claim that fat people who accept responsibility are healthier than fat people who blame someone else are you? Fat is fat, who cares why they think they are fat?

[longtermmemmory]

She has to sue the fast food companies for her daughter's fatness. Otherwise the mother is forced to admit her own lack of "motherhood" is the root of her daughters gross obesity.

[SheLion]

I think I'll have a donut,coffee and a cigarette !

I'll show them!!!!!!

Yes, me too!

[fatnotlazy]

I'm fat...I don't contribute to higher health care costs. I haven't been to a doctor in years. All that health care just makes me worse. I do a better job of fighting this disease on my own.

[SheLion]

What I don't get is all the obese smokers!!!!!!

Well, I sure hope this guy doesn't smoke.  He will certainly get double whammed!

[Montfort]

But if the government were to try to reduce the incidence of promiscuous high-risk sex, courts would strike anything down as violating that zone of privacy that covers sex and nothing but sex.

[1Old Pro]

Let's make eating in public buildings and bars and restaurants ILLEGAL. If people want to eat, force them out into the streets and the inclement weather.

[1Old Pro]

There are lawmakers in MA that want to stop All You Can Eat Buffets. Apparently in America, no one should eat, as much as they want.

Good, they should also make large SUV's illegal and force people to drive tiny cars. Fa people would have to lose weight before they could drive as they wouldn't fit in the government mandated small cars.

[Serb5150]

The problem being that if personal responsibility is somehow taken out of the equasion, when obesity becomes a 'disease' rather than the direct result of choices an individual has made throughout their life (again, I'm slightly over-generalizing here, not taking into account people with genuine medical reasons behind the condition), what you now have is yet another expense that must be picked up by the American taxpayer. As you mentioned earlier, it is often the poorerest segment of the population that has the highest rates of obesity. Guess who is paying for their healthcare?

No, I don't support additional taxes on high fat foods. But when you hear about situations like those mentioned in post #90, it seems clear that something is out of whack.

[guitfiddlist]

We gotta do something!!! The national obesity rate skyrocketed one night in 1998. That's when Schwarzenegger became obese and Mel Gibson and Michael Jordan became officially overweight, along with 61% of the rest of us, without even eating a thing!

http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0229/news-shapiro.shtml

"In 1998, the National Institutes of Health came up with new guidelines based on a complicated height-weight calculation that determines something called the "body mass index" or BMI. (Your BMI is your weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared; to get yours quickly, go to the BMI calculator at www.nhlbisupport.com/bmi.) Before, the government didn't call you overweight until, if you were a woman, you had a BMI of 27.3 (164 pounds for someone 5-foot-5) or if a man, 27.8 (205 pounds for a 6-footer).

Now you're officially overweight once you hit a BMI of 25, whatever your gender (for someone 5-foot-5, that's 150 pounds; for someone 6-foot, 184 pounds). Obesity, previously not precisely quantified, now sets in at a BMI of 30 (180 pounds for the 5-foot-5 person, 221 pounds for the 6-foot- tall individual."

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I propose that fat-cat, cigar-smoking tobacco suit lawyers be brought in to the rescue. They can sue all the fast-food places, restaurants that serve big portions, and every last junk food manufacturer evil enough to sell their products to the American people.

Then they can take 30% of the hundreds of billions of dollars they'll milk out of this particular cow, the states can divvy up the spoils for funding illegal alien health care and in-state tuition, and the federal government can spend the rest on the Prescription Drug plan. As for the obese people, the NIH can just redefine the BMI standards back to where they were, once everybody's extorted all that's extortable, so that all the obese people can be miraculously cured overnight.

Un-frikkin'believable.

[monday]

"As you mentioned earlier, it is often the poorerest segment of the population that has the highest rates of obesity. Guess who is paying for their healthcare?"

But that isn't fat peoples fault. Out politicians are the ones passing laws that make taxpayers responsible for other peoples problems. Fat people don't have a lobby which is pushing for extra medical care for the overweight. Why attack fat people when it is the politicians who are stealing your money?

[MEGoody]

"Take your pick but smoking is not a good thing. I pledge my stomach in the fight against obesity. We aren't going to defeat the Chinese and N Koreans with a bunch of Sumo wrestlers."

That's wonderful and all, but you aren't supporting 'sin' taxes are you?