A gold mine for government?
Tobacco and alcohol have long been subject to "sin taxes" used by state and federal governments to pay for children's and health programs. Now a new sin may join the list: Fast food.
Before you dismiss this agenda as the pie-in-the-sky wish list of wannabe social engineers, consider the trajectory of the Twinkie tax, which has gone from reductio ad absurdum to serious policy proposal in just a few years. In a June 1994 newspaper ad that criticized proposals to sharply raise tobacco taxes, R.J. Reynolds said: "Today it's cigarettes. Will high-fat foods be next?" Anti-smoking activists traditionally responded to this sort of slippery-slope argument by insisting that cigarettes were unique, "the only legal product that when used as intended causes death." To suggest that anti-smoking measures might pave the way for attacks on cheeseburgers and ice cream, they said, was just silly.
Yet six months after R.J. Reynolds tried to scare people with the outlandish prospect of a tax on fatty foods, Yale University's Kelly Brownell endorsed the idea on the op-ed page of The New York Times, citing the precedent set by cigarette taxes. He said "taxing foods with little nutritional value" would deter consumption and help raise money for bike paths, running tracks, and nutrition education. "Fatty foods would be judged on their nutritive value per calorie or gram of fat," he explained. "The least healthy would be given the highest tax rate."
If the low “cost” of eating fast food is adding to the obesity problem, the solution involves increasing the cost, even in a nominal way. How do we give individuals the incentive to pay a little more — increased physical exertion, lack of convenience — to get their food? This is where a drive-through tax comes in.
We could tax the drive-through purchases at, say, 10 percent, while leaving the purchase of walk-in meals alone. At the very least, it may entice some to park and walk rather than waiting in the car.
Now, this may seem an invasion of personal choice or another step toward a nanny state. Maybe. But there are other arguments to be made. We tax cigarettes in part because of their health cost. Similarly, the individual’s decision to lead a sedentary lifestyle will end up costing taxpayers. In 2001, the surgeon general issued a report noting that obesity and its complications cost the nation $117 billion annually, much of it through Medicare and Medicaid.
Imposing a drive-through tax would be one way of recouping future taxpayer outlays — perhaps revenues could go directly to government health programs. And who knows, it could help the environment, too: with one move, we could fight obesity and reduce emissions from all those cars idling in the line at Burger King.
Clearly, too much TV.
More television equals fatter kids, according to a new study by researcher Leonard Epstein. "Television viewing is related to consumption of fast food and foods and beverages that are advertised on television. Viewing cartoons with embedded food commercials can increase choice of the advertised item in pre-schoolers, and television commercials may prompt eating," he wrote.
Is TV bad for you? And if so, how can we get kids to cut back?
Critics ceaselessly point out television's alleged faults. The growing girth of the nation is blamed on it; increased violence; higher levels of teen sexual activity; and finally, we are assured, the idiot box is generally dumbing us all down. But we have plenty of reasons to doubt that bill of indictment on television. Children today are watching slightly less television per day than they were a decade ago, even as they continue to pork up. Violent crime rates have been falling in the United States for a decade; and rates often sexual activity and pregnancy have fallen dramatically since the mid-1990s. Average IQs have been soaring along with TV viewing for decades.
Q: One study you wrote about even suggested that having your kid stare at a wall -- if you could get the child to do that -- would actually be better for him than watching TV. Why is that?
A: In this study, they had kids doing various sedentary things, and the kids who watched TV burned fewer calories than they did doing any other sedentary activity. Maybe it has a sedating effect on your metabolism.
There are multiple ways in which TV may contribute to obesity. There's the fact that you're not burning calories. There's the fact that children and adults tend to eat unconsciously while they're watching TV, if they have food or drink in front of them. And there's the fact that there's a lot of advertising on TV so you're constantly getting cues to go get a snack or go get a soda.
And I even read one study that said when people eat lying down they tend to feel less full, and they tend to go on eating longer. A lot of kids snack lying down while they're watching TV.
This is healthy. You're probably not eating it.
Here's an interesting thought: What if you're not to blame for your weight problem?
What if the fault could be laid squarely at the feet of food manufacturers and marketers, grocery store managers, restaurant operators, food vendors -- the people who make food so visible, available and mouth-watering?
Several recent studies, papers and a popular weight-loss book argue that eating is an automatic behavior triggered by environmental cues that most people are unaware of -- or simply can't ignore.
What makes you fat? Eating cheesy-poofs while watching Sex in the City reruns? Wolfing down a Wendy's "Baconator," comprising a double cheeseburger with six strips of bacon that could feed everyone in Darfur for a week? How about when you get the urge to exercise you lie down until it goes away, as one CEO famously put it? Yes, to all of the above. But these are all specific contributors to obesity driven by larger forces that are making us, well, larger.
Turns out, obesity is contagious.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
