A week ago last Friday, I spoke to a group of students studying under the Congressional Hunger Fellowship. I was invited as the bad guy, as it were. I was to defend personal responsibility in a panel discussion on obesity (why a group charged with studying and fighting hunger was discussing obesity is another matter). My co-panelists were Fern Estrow, an anti-corporate nutritionist, and Barry Sackin, whom you can read about here.

These kinds of debates often devolve into “dueling studies” — data that supports my conclusions versus data that supports yours. Audiences then are left wondering whose data to believe, and no one really goes away thinking differently than they did when they came in.

So I decided to largely leave the studies alone, and focus on the principled case against government intervention. Of course, during the Q&A, the question who’s studies are more believable inevitably came up, anyway.

The kids were very polite and inquizzative, even those who obviously disagreed with me (which would be most of them). I got laughs at my laugh lines, and even saw a few heads bobbing in agreement. Afterward, three asked me for more information, and expressed some sympathy for my position.

My co-panelists weren’t so accomodating. “Rude” probably isn’t the appropriate word. “Condescending” works better. Upon reading that I would be making the case for personal responsibility, Sackin said to me before the panel, “I can’t even possibly think of what you might say.”

One exchange was particularly memorable. After hearing Estrow and Sackin describe how the food industry had deliberately made some foods cheaper through “supersizing” (the horror!), I noted that the USDA recently did a study and found that the average American can fulfill his requirement of fruits and vegetables for less than 70 cents per day.

At this, Estrow countered that my point was irrelevant, because many inner-city people simply don’t have access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and can’t get out to the suburbs where they’re sold.

This is true. The solution of course, is to figure out a way to get those fruits and vegetables to poor areas, and to do so cheaply. Guess who’s figured out a way to do that? Wal-Mart! They’ve been doing it in the exurbs and rural areas for years. Yet every time a Wal-Mart attempts to open a superstore with a grocery in an urban area, it’s people like Estrow who raise holy hell to prevent it from happening.

That, or they decry gentrification when a place like Whole Foods opens up in an emerging neighborhood (granted, the very poor can’t afford Whole Foods’ organic produce — but the store employs locally, and preliminary studies show that gentrification doesn’t generally lead to a great deal of displacement among longtime residents).

At that, Estrow went off on a bizarre tangent about artichokes. She recalled a time when she was browsing an inner-city grocery, and found artichokes for sale. This apparently appalled her. Poor people, she said, don’t know how to prepare artichokes. And so it’s offensive for grocers to sell artichokes in low-income areas.

I was floored.

First, I’m not sure what she said is true. Lots of ethnic communities make good use of the artichoke. Obviously, that particular grocery sold enough artichokes in that community to find them worth stocking. If the grocer was throwing them out at the end of the day, he wouldn’t order more.

Second, how incredibly patronizing!

At this point, I asked Estrow what her solution to the access problem might be. Her answer? “Community-owned farmer’s markets.”

Ah, blessed socialism! She may have a point. How many chunky people do you recall seeing in the former Soviet Union? And I’m sure rural Virginia and Maryland farmers would love to trek in to Southeast D.C. each day to ply their produce at artificially suppressed prices!

But no artichokes, please. Those bumbling poor people have no idea what to do with them.

Click “more” for my speech to the fellows.

I’d like to begin my presentation by asking a pretty simple question: Why are we here? Why are we talking about obesity just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol in a setting and format usually reserved for discussions of public policy? Why did the U.S. Surgeon General recently say that obesity is “every bit as threatening to us as the terrorist threat?” How did such a private, personal decision — what we put into our bodies — become fodder for television anchors, newspaper writers, and lawmakers? More importantly, if our pants size, dinner plates, and the content of our refrigerators becomes subject to politicians and regulators, what in the world is left that could properly be deemed “personal,” and beyond the purview of government?

The answer is complex, but it deals with our ever-expanding concept of “public health.” “Public health” at one time only referred to risks to which no rational person would subject himself. That might include communicable diseases like tuberculosis and polio, preparing natural disasters like tornados and hurricanes, and today we might throw in the threats of chemical or biological terrorism. These are legitimate “public health” threats. None of us is really capable of preparing for such things on our own. And none of us would knowingly expose ourselves to them. Protection, prevention, and response to these kinds of threats are what economists call “public goods.”

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, we decided the government should start protecting people not just from threats to which no rational person would subject himself, but from activities and habits to which we voluntarily subject ourselves. Some of them are risky. Some are only perceived to be risky. But for the most part we know the risks. And we undertake the activities anyway, because we get some benefit from them that we feel outweighs the risk.

I believe we began to cross this line with alcohol prohibition early last century. It continued with the drug war, which actually started at about the same time as alcohol prohibition, cooled off for several decades, then fired up again in the 1980s. From there we get things like seatbelt laws, motorcycle helmet laws, anti-smoking measures, laws aimed at curbing alcohol consumption, and now, finally, we’ve arrived at obesity. None of these things are really “public health” in the sense that all of them are activities that individuals volunteer to enter into at little or no risk to anyone else.

So I guess my question for you today isn’t so much “who’s to blame” as it is, “why are we assigning blame in the first place?”

The fact of the matter is, we all basically know what’s good for us. I’d suggest that in a survey of 1,000 Americans, you’d be hard-pressed to find ten who are honestly ignorant of the fact that fresh fruits and vegetables are better to eat daily than a Big Mac and fries. Nobody orders a Hardee’s Monster Thickburger, or a Burger King Super Omelet Sandwich thinking either is a health food item. It’s an indulgence. We know that.

So the question becomes, why are we even talking about this? Yes, many Americans are overweight. Others are obese. But why is that of anyone else’s concern? Why do we feel we need to assign blame? And once we do assign blame, then what?

Let’s assume for a moment that we settle the question today. We conclude that corporations are in fact mostly to blame for the obesity problem. Well now what? Do we penalize Hardees and McDonalds for giving consumers are product they want? Do we forbid them from advertising a legal product? Sure, McDonalds is ubiquitous. But why is that? I’d submit that McDonalds is everywhere because McDonalds is giving us what we want, at a good price. We’re buying Big Macs. If we weren’t, McDonalds wouldn’t be around long. The question then becomes, what should McDonalds have done differently? In the 1980s, the chain in fact did test-market several products that today’s anti-obesity activists would call “healthy.” They failed. Miserably. Should McDonalds have gone ahead and gone to market with a product its test-marketing said wouldn’t sell?

Concluding that the food industry is responsible for our expanding waistlines also implies that we as consumers are incapable our own decisions about what we eat. It implies that those of us who are overweight simply don’t know any better than to eat food that makes us fat. It’s pretty condescending, really.

But more to the point, what are the consequences of that position? Seems to me, it means someone else ought to make those kinds of decisions for us. Let’s go back to those other aspects of “public health” that aren’t legitimate public goods. The government has decided, for example, that some illicit drugs are bad for us, and that, furthermore, we’re incapable of making our own decisions about whether or not to use them. So it bans them. And it puts us in jail if we ingest them. The government has also determined that tobacco is bad for us, and that many of us are too susceptible to tobacco advertising to make our own decisions about whether or not to smoke. So it has banned most tobacco advertising. It punishes smokers with excise taxes. And increasingly, it’s out and out banning smoking, too. We’re getting ever-more stringent laws concerning the sale and consumption of alcohol, too.

Are we ready for the day when high-fat or high-sugar foods are treated the same way alcohol, tobacco, or even illicit drugs are? It’s not as farfetched as it sounds. Many cities and states are already considering excise taxes on foods some people consider bad for us. Some nutrition activists want bans on the advertising and marketing of sugary foods in the same manner we restrict alcohol and tobacco advertising. Might you one day need to show ID to buy a candy bar? It sounds ridiculous. But just five or so years ago, the idea of suing food makers for the fact that we’re fat sounded ridiculous too. Now life and parody have merged.

Critics of the food industry blame marketing tactics, and practices like “supersizing,” which might be the first time in history that an industry has been criticized for giving customers to much product at too low a price. They say the food industry has “addicted” us to bad foods by making them cheap, while making healthy foods more expensive. But that’s simply not true. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently conducted a survey, and found that the average American can fulfill his seven recommended servings of fruit and vegetables for 64 cents per day, less than the cost of most candy bars. Produce is cheap.

The simple fact is, we have lots of choice in the food marketplace today. That’s a good thing. We can opt for the greasy cheeseburger, or we can opt for a garden sub at Subway. Even within fast food restaurants, there are now healthy and more indulgent options. Nutrition activists blame the food industry, but their real problem is that they simply don’t like the decisions some consumers are making. Diet activists can’t seem to fathom the fact that many people know a slice of sugar cream pie or a Krispy Kreme donut isn’t good for them. They know that it will add to their waistline. They know that making a regular habit of such indulgences might take a bit off the end of their lives. But they eat the stuff anyway. Why? Who knows? Perhaps they value the pleasure they get from the experience more than they value the extra month or two in the nursing home they could get by avoiding it.

My question for the nutrition activists is, why is it any of your business? Shouldn’t people be allowed to make their own decisions — even bad ones?

So what about the kids? Shouldn’t we at least put some protections in place prevent kids from being preyed upon by advertisers?

I’d argue “no.”

Studies from the University of North Carolina actually show that overall caloric intake among kids is up just 1 percent over the last 20 years. Kids really aren’t eating much more these days. Activity levels are down more than 12 percent. That too me suggest that kids aren’t falling victim to nefarious marketers so much as staying inside and playing more video games. It’s not even clear that kids are eating the wrong foods. A an article in Nutrition Review says that the amount of calories kids get from fat has been on a downward trajectory since the mid-1960s.

The places that have tried policies such as banning marketing to kids haven’t had much success. Sweden, Norway, and Quebec all have such restrictions in place, and they really haven’t had much effect on childhood obesity at all. Sweden in fact has had a ban in place for nearly a decade, and its obesity rates have steadily risen with the rest of Europe’s.

The best predictor of what kids are going to eat is what adults eat, particularly the parents. A 2002 study shows that consumption of various food types over the last twenty years have trended the same way among all age groups. With the exception of alcohol, kids generally eat and drink the same types of foods adults do. The corollary to that is that if we want to change what kids are eating, we need to change what adults are eating. I’m not sure that’s possible, or even desirable.

I was asked not to wade into the debate over whether or not obesity is as widespread as it’s reported to be, or whether or not it’s really all that unhealthy to be overweight. But when it comes to childhood obesity in particular, I think it’s important to note that the science is far from conclusive. There’s no good way to measure “obesity” in kids, mostly because kids develop at different rates at different ages. What’s more, there’s conflicting data about whether obese kids grow up to be obese or unhealthy adults. There’s also the problem of unintended consequences. For all the talk about Type II diabetes in children, teens and adolescents today are still 500-700 times more likely to have an eating disorder than they are to have Type II diabetes. That to me suggests that all this talk about weight and fat, and proposals to start weighing kids at school — as Arkansas has done — could have some pretty awful unintended consequences.

Let me get back to whether or not changing the eating patterns of adults is a good idea. At the beginning of this presentation, I asked why we’re here. We’re here because various social trends and habits have caused many of us to put on a few extra pounds. And we’re here because some people those extra pounds are worthy of public debate. But this didn’t happen in a vacuum. Something caused us to put on, on average, five to seven extra pounds per person. And if we look a little closer at the causes, we might find that we value them more than we value a svelte physique.

For example, it’s common for ex-smokers to gain significant weight after quitting the habit. One study from the National Bureau of Economic Research has suggested that the obesity and overweight phenomenon could be the result of the massive public health effort to get people to quit smoking.

That same study also found that the movement of women from the home to the workforce has also contributed to the problem. Fast food, prepared food, and microweavable food has thrived because we simply don’t have the time we once had for a balanced, slow-cooked meal. Fast food companies aren’t evil, they’re simply giving people what they want — quick, good-tasting food at a cheap price.

I don’t think any of us would say the fact that many of us have quit smoking or that more women have entered the workforce is a bad thing, even if either may have contributed to our bulging bellies. My point here is that its silly to lay “blame” for pudginess. It’s simply the result of a series of decisions we’ve made. We quit smoking, we started eating. We’re spending less time at home, so we need quick meals that are inexpensive.

America is prosperous because of choice. Governments of free people don’t subvert free choice, even if doing so might ensure good health. Sure, we’d all like to live a long life. But as the academic Richard Klein has written:

“Healthism in America has sought to make longevity the principle measure of a good life. To be a survivor is to acquire moral distinction. But another view, a dandy’s perhaps, would say that living, as distinct from surviving, acquires its value from risks and sacrifices that tend to shorten life and hasten dying.”

Governments of free societies are first and foremost charged with securing liberty. That most certainly includes the liberty to hold bad habits.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 13th, 2005 at 12:36 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.