Weight Maven

Curious news out of Forbes today. On the one hand, we have Americans getting spanked for “ignoring the basic rules for preventing” heart disease and related issues. No big surprise there.

On the other, they report that a recent public health study has found snack food for sale in 41 percent of “retail outlets that did not sell food as their primary merchandise.” 1 in 5 furniture stores sell snacks? Really?!

This brings to mind a line from Thomas More’s Utopia:

[If] you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this but that you first make thieves and then punish them?

(Disclosure: I’m not that well read; I first heard this line in the movie Ever After!)

I find this somewhat compelling when considering obesity.

Of course I realize that we all ultimately have control over what we choose to put into our mouths and whether we spend our lives in front of the TV. But individuals don’t act in a vacuum either.

This was the one issue I had with the movie Fat Head:

I get Tom Naughton’s point (and his libertarian bent). No, McDonald’s (or any fast food chain) isn’t dragging anyone kicking or screaming into their restaurants. They are selling us what we will buy.

But when two-thirds of adults in the US are overweight, and almost one-third are obese (WIN), that’s a whole lot of individual failures.

We have a big problem. Our culture makes a lot of people fat. And what’s worse, what is making people fat is making them sick. And that’s going to cost us all a lot.

But keep in mind that what makes us fat also makes a lot of money for industry — those that contribute to our piling on the pounds and those that profess to help us take them off. And both are pretty invested in obesity as a personal responsibility issue. But how well has that worked over the last couple of decades?

Are we making people fat and then punishing them?