The Politics of Obesity

By Colman McCarthy

America’s chowhounds, the 78 million tubbies and chubbies of ever widening girth and who can’t resist second and third helpings, are under siege. As well they should be. Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City has proposed a ban on supersized sugary soft drinks in restaurants, theaters and other sites. Last year the mayor successfully went after trans-fat, the ultimate artery-clogger, as well as banning smoking in public places.

Predictably, the sellers and buyers of sugar water are sour on what they see as one more government intrusion on personal liberty. In reality, it’s the other way around. The intruders are the estimated 34 percent of adults who are overweight and 33 percent who are obese whose irresponsible diets create severe economic costs that the non-gluttonous are forced to pay while the heavies chomp away on unhealthy foods.

A few facts from the Campaign to End Obesity on the costs of the fattening of America:

--a yearly medical tab of $190 billion, ranging from treating diabetes to heart disease.

--$5 billion wasted on jet fuel to get the wide-bodied airborne.

--$4 billion extra at the pump for gasoline for the orotund.

--in one state alone, Georgia, obesity cost more than $2.4 billion in medical bills.

No sleuthing is needed to explain how America became the world’s heavyweight champ, the global leader in gorging while much of the world suffers hunger and malnutrition. The Food Network cooking shows—from Paula Deen, the Butter Babe, to Diners, Drive-ins and Dives—hawk high fat recipes. On prime time TV, among the major advertisers are the big four in heart attack foods: McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and KFC, and washed down with well-advertised soda and beer. In school cafeterias, adiposity starts early where pizza, hamburgers and cheese are staples, with vending machines down the hall offering more gustatory garbage in Cheetos, Fritos, Nachos, Tacos and Sickos.

It isn’t as if the flabby set can’t understand how their food choices are destructive to themselves and costly to society. It’s that their minds are in competition with three powerful forces: eyes, noses and tongues. Unhealthy food can look, smell and taste good. It’s as if you were playing tennis but with three people on the other side of the court. Unless you are one of the Williams sisters, any doubt who would win?

In “Breaking the Food Seduction,” Neal Barnard, MD, the president and founder of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, persuasively argues that the human brain’s pleasure center releases dopamine when a food satisfies a taste, regardless of its positive or negative effects on the body: “In the distant past, food choices were limited, and our pleasure center did not have a particularly challenging job. It helped us remember the difference between luscious, sweet fruits and immature ones, and between plump, fatty nuts and others that had become shriveled and dried. But sugary, fatty, delectable goods are everywhere nowadays, ready to confuse our senses and lead us astray.”

Chocolate bars, doughnuts, slabs of cheese or meat, cakes, sugar drinks and assorted assaults on the body, Barnard believes, “are capable of simulating precisely the same part of the brain that responds to heroin. And that is why they can be addicting. The fact is, we’ve been a bit too clever for our own good, refining food products to the point where they provide all the pleasure and very little of the nutrition we need.”

Mayor Bloomberg deserves credit for taking on the sugar drinkers, as does Michelle Obama and her “Let’s Move” program to end obesity “in a generation.” To prevent weak-willed fat people--food hedons who live to eat rather than eat to live--from causing economic harm to those who’s diets are responsible and ethical, more action is needed. Make them feel the monetary heat if they won’t see the nutritional light. Start with scales. At airports, have pre-board weigh-ins: require the obese pay more, say $20 a pound. At supermarkets, put scales at the check-out lines and add a 10 percent charge to the heavies. When driving licenses are renewed, triple the costs for the waistline challenged.

We are told, with sound evidence, that obesity is an epidemic, with medical costs soaring. It isn’t unfair, then, for the overweight to overpay. Thinning wallets may be the only way of thinning bodies.