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Tolerance for regulation is growing even though we know little about its effectiveness
There is a glimmer of hope for the fat countries of the world – for Mexico, which has recently outstripped the US as the most overweight population in the Americas, and for Britain and Hungary, which vie for the title of Europe’s most obese nation. A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows a steep drop in obesity among US toddlers. While a seventh (14 per cent) of children aged two to five had a very high body mass index a decade ago, only a 12th (8 per cent) did the last time they were measured in 2011-12. The study has been somewhat oversold. The JAMA authors stressed that they had found, overall, “no significant changes in obesity prevalence”. But the good news among the two-to-fivers has left nutrition and fitness advocates fighting over the credit. Who deserves it?
Michelle Obama, the US president’s wife, is ready to claim her share. She is the public face of government campaigns against childhood obesity. In a press release issued by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after the JAMA study, the first lady professed herself “thrilled at the progress we’ve made over the last few years”. But this progress largely antedates Mrs Obama. Most of the period covered in the JAMA study came during the presidency of George W Bush. Mrs Obama’s exercise programme “Let’s Move” was founded only in 2010. While she has assiduously promoted new, health-conscious school menus ordered by Congress and regulators, the menus themselves have been a flop. Scraps of meat, grainy pasta . . . As a critical government report euphemistically put it in July, schools have “experienced various challenges related to student acceptance of some of the foods”.
ON THIS STORY
- Observations Douglas Coupland – living big
- Mexico’s obesity epidemic
- US to overhaul nutrition labels on food
- Coke Out for the calorie count
- Comment How the world lost its waistline
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
Public health experts have been diagnosing an “obesity epidemic” since the 1980s. The JAMA report does not claim that it has abated, although there are promising signs in certain regions. Federal nutrition programmes for the poor now cover more fruits, yoghurts and other healthy foods. Breastfeeding, which is correlated with healthy children, has increased. Still, much about nutrition and fitness remains a mystery to us. Some research shows that drinkers of whole milk are less obese than drinkers of low-fat milk. There seems to be a genetic component in obesity, too. And our knowledge of how to design health incentives is rather primitive. A Danish “fat tax” meant to curtail overeating backfired when it was introduced in 2011, and was withdrawn.
American society poses special challenges. Fast food is (like much else in US culture) cheap, exciting and addictive. A time-honoured sales trick for an American retailer is to give buyers a really good deal on stuff they do not need. Many consumers imagine that the part of a business they interact with – the product – is the whole of it. They ignore rent, transport, personnel, inventorying, advertising, publicity etc. So the offer of twice as much food for 50 per cent more money strikes many buyers as a bargain, even if the larger portion adds only 10 per cent to the restaurateur or retailer’s costs. The incentive to “supersize” food portions and drinks cups is huge, and built-in.
But such incentives have always existed. A couple of new developments have made them more fattening. One is the near banning of a potent and popular appetite suppressant: nicotine. If you are a smoker who skips breakfast and only pecks at lunch and dinner, you are less likely to get fat, even if there is nothing in your refrigerator except beer, steak and ice cream. Another factor is that women are now mostly in the workplace, rather than monitoring their families’ food. Children make more of their own nutritional decisions, guided in part by companies that want to profit off them.
That may explain North America’s growing tolerance for obesity-related regulation. Now a group of Canadian doctors argues for a junk-food tax in the American Journal of Public Health on the grounds that “the costs of obesity arising from individuals’ poor nutritional choices are borne by society as a whole through taxes, lost productivity and an overburdened healthcare system”. Of course, you could say the same of almost any kind of poor choice, but Americans seem not to mind. In 2000 a New Mexico judge ordered that Anamarie Martinez-Regino be removed from her parents’ home on grounds of her weight. The order shocked and repelled Americans. But the political culture has changed. The former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and other politicians have even managed to win re-election fighting trans fats and seeking bans on big fizzy drinks.
The goal is to make people look and feel better by giving them less autonomy. “You can never be too rich or too skinny,” the Hollywood saying goes. But you can be too fat, and also, apparently, too free.
The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
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