So we've found a new enemy: obesity. Two years ago, the U.S. government discovered that the targets of previous crusades--booze, sex, guns and cigarettes--were killing a smaller percentage of Americans than they used to. The one thing you're not allowed to do in a culture war is win it, so we searched the mortality data for the next big menace. The answer was as plain as the other chin on your face. Obesity, federal officials told us, would soon surpass tobacco as the chief cause of preventable death. They compared it to the Black Death and the Asian tsunami. They sent a team of "disease detectives" to West Virginia to investigate an obesity outbreak. Last month, Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona called obesity "the terror within" and said it would "dwarf 9/11."
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Targeting kids is a familiar way to impose morals without threatening liberties. You can have a beer or an abortion, but your daughter can't. The conservative aspect of this argument is that you're entitled, as a parent, to decide what your kids can do or buy. That's the pitch Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) made last week in a bill to crack down on junk food in schools. The liberal half of the argument is that kids are too young to make informed choices. In this case, it's true. Studies show that little kids ask for products they see on television, fail to distinguish ads from programs, and are heavily targeted by companies peddling candy, fast food and sugared cereal.
This stage of the fat war will be a rout. In schools, the audience is young and captive, and the facts are appalling. According to a government report, 75 percent of high schools, 65 percent of middle schools and 30 percent of elementary schools have contracts with "beverage"--i.e., soda--companies. The sodas are commonly sold through vending machines. The contracts stipulate how many thousands of cases each district has to buy, and they offer schools a bigger cut of the profits from soda than from juice or water. Soda companies, realizing they're going to lose this fight, are fleeing elementary schools and arguing that high-schoolers are old enough to choose. But health advocates refuse to draw such a line. They're not going to stop at kids.
To keep junk food away from adults, fat fighters will have to explain why obesity is the government's business. Some say the government created the problem by subsidizing pork, sugar, cream, high-fructose corn syrup and other crud. Harkin reasons that the government pays for school lunches and must protect this "investment." But the main argument is that obesity inflates health care costs and hurts the economy through disability and lost productivity. A few weeks ago, former president Bill Clinton, a confessed overeater, told the nation's governors that obesity has caused more than a quarter of the rise in health care costs since 1987 and threatens our economic competitiveness. It's not our dependence on foreign oil that's killing us. It's our dependence on vegetable oil.
Sometimes this crap gets depressing. I started out my morning by reading some moron claiming that because smoking bans aren't really bad for business they're a good thing and then I subject myself to reading about people limiting my food options. This health stuff really sucks because once these jerks get socialized medicine they can really claim that my love of Oreos and fried chicken should be outlawed in the interests of reducing health care expenditures.
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