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OBESITY POLICY ON BOTH ENDS.
"Only in December did the U.S. Department of Agriculture modify the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program to assist low-income families in buying fresh fruits and produce," reports The Washington Post in their feature on obesity. "The addition was blocked for a decade by politics and by industry sectors worried that WIC's food packages would contain less milk, eggs and cheese."
The WIC is a federal program that "provides Federal grants to States for supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and non-breastfeeding postpartum women, and to infants and children up to age five who are found to be at nutritional risk." In other words, it's a health program for expectant mothers and young families. And for decades, the program was blocked from encouraging families to buy fruits and produce and instead used to push saturated fat, cholesterol, and more cholesterol milk, eggs, and cheese. Charming.
Folks talk a fair amount about the obesity crisis, but here's the number that sticks in my head: 27 percent. Between 1987 and 2001, health spending rose by about $1,110. And 27 percent of that increase was directly attributable to the rise in obesity. Not, mind you, total obesity. Simply the rise in obesity. Now multiply 300,000,000 by $301. That tremendous number? That's how much we, as a country, paid to offset the health costs of rising obesity in fiscal year 2001. Worried about obesity yet?
Obviously, obesity isn't something the government can reverse by fiat. But nor need public policy be arrayed so as to intensify the epidemic. Schools raise money through vending machines and exclusive deals with snack food companies. Corn production is subsidized to such an absurd degree that industry had to figure out a way to make it not-corn, so they could use it more, and so we got high fructose corn syrup and the heavily processed, nutritionally inadequate, dead cheap foods it tends to sweeten. In 2005, Congress passed a $286 billion highway bill -- an enormous subsidy meant to make the country more drivable. No equivalent sum was spent to make our communities more walkable. In essence, we're paying to make our country fatter, then paying even more to keep our alive as the health costs of obesity come due. It's insane.
Picture used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user Stan.
COMMENTS (16)
We should worry about high fat diets for women and older children. Babies and toddlers, however, need fat in their diets.
Posted by: Cardinal Fang | May 19, 2008 10:45 AM
WIC checks are the worst. They force lower income families into eating unhealthy foods. That's bad enough. But no supermarket, in my experience anyways, has a good system for dealing with them. If someone is using a WIC check, then it's a good bet that they're going to be stuck at the check out for at least 15 minutes.
Posted by: Rusty | May 19, 2008 10:53 AM
obesity=slothfulness and acedia
a quote from aleksandr solzhenitsyn:
"in the united states, the difficulties are not a minotaur or a dragon - not imprisonment, death, government harrassment and censorship - but cupidity, sloppiness and indifference."
Posted by: jacqueline | May 19, 2008 11:15 AM
Random tangent: One of the local DC magazines has a picture of a fat kid sitting on a couch and playing Xbox, saying this is the problem of our rising obesity.
F--- that!
Obesity is rising among all age groups, and if you lack exercise whether you are playing videogames, watching tv, reading a book, or going to a baseball game. These sedentary lifestyles span the ages.
It's about whether you forgo exercise, drive absolutely everywhere, or eat junk food. America does all of these in abundance, and obesity is a result of our entire culture.
But no, most adults much rather blame kids and their new-fangled video games.
Posted by: Shock Mouse | May 19, 2008 11:31 AM
Aside from the points you make in the post (re: goverment subsidizing policies and programs that decrease our health) they also spelled borough wrong on that billboard.
Posted by: maurinsky | May 19, 2008 11:56 AM
Thanks for my mornings three minutes of hate on fatties.
Now I'm off to
Kate Harding's for a few facts as antidote.
--ml
Posted by: Marty Langeland | May 19, 2008 12:36 PM
Sorry, link busted. Try this:
http://kateharding.net/but-dont-you-realize-fat-is-unhealthy/
--ml
Posted by: Marty Langeland | May 19, 2008 12:38 PM
http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2006/11/obesity-paradox-1.html
Posted by: Floccina | May 19, 2008 12:57 PM
OK, seriously? Why the fuck do you think everything is about "hating the fatties"?
Posted by: C. Diane | May 19, 2008 1:42 PM
Why is anyone believing anything a 23 year old poli-sci major says about issues of medicine, nutrition, child growth and development, food, weight, science, or agriculture/food production? There isn't a single credible sentence here. The greatest concern raised in his post is its evidence of the quality of today's university educations. Now, that has me worried.
Posted by: Rene | May 19, 2008 1:43 PM
"This week, France reported that it has stopped the rise in overweight children over the past decade or so.
The news emerged from the 2008 European Congress on Obesity in Geneva. One study showed that there was no change in the weight of French seven to nine-year-olds between 2000 and 2007. In another survey the French Food Safety Agency (AFSSA) found no significant change in random samples of three to 17-year-olds in 1998-99 and 2006-2007.
The French results have caused a stir because they are the first evidence that it is possible to stop the blight of obesity that is sweeping the affluent world -- including France. The experts are being cautious, but credit for the French success is being given to programmes that have been running for over a decade."
http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/charles_bremner/
Posted by: disinterested observer | May 19, 2008 4:40 PM
He's not barging into your house, turning on your computer, and forcing you to read his blog Rene.
If you have a problem with his youth, complaining about it isn't going to make him older.
Posted by: mad6798j | May 19, 2008 5:40 PM
According to the study you linked, "When we isolate the impact of changes in obesity prevalence alone, we find that the increase in the proportion of the population that is obese accounts for 12 percent of real per capita spending growth."
27 percent includes not just increased spending due to the increase in obesity prevalence, but also increased spending due to better treatments now being available for diseases correlated with being overweight (such as diabetes).
Posted by: Barry Deutsch | May 19, 2008 6:57 PM
So many people think obesity is merely caused by too many calories and too little exercise. However, the huge increase in obesity in my children's generation, who do not eat worse than my generation, is simply mind-boggling. What is going on?
Clues: fluoridation in water, BPA, chemicals fed to cattle to make it fatten up faster(which then are ingested by humans), fewer nutrients per calorie in food raised in quasi-hydroponic conditions (lack of nutrients has many hormonal effects), and on and on and on
Hating fatties isn't very useful, and berating people who have subtle hormonal damage for displaying the symptoms thereof isn't helpful or intelligent. These issues need more research.
On the other hand, yes, the WIC regulations are entirely outdated. But the fund is meant to make sure children get enough protein and calcium, not that they get fed a fad diet.
Posted by: Carol | May 19, 2008 8:07 PM
Fat is where it's at.
Fat people need to lighten up.
Posted by: Joko | May 20, 2008 3:19 PM
We can't say ANYTHING about obesity until we get enough studies that control for activity levels, which seem to be a far better predictor of overall health than size.
--
"I note, too, that biological sex is a far better predictor of mortality risk than fatness, and that castration extends life expectancy in large mammals. Thus, unlike the "obesity epidemic" there is a ready solution to the "masculinity epidemic" - but perhaps some diseases aren't worth curing."
Paul Campos, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-dustup17sep17,0,109330.story
Posted by: alice | May 20, 2008 5:25 PM