Winning the War on Obesity
posted by Frank Pasquale
Nicholas Kristof’s column on potential junk food taxes in New York provides some terrific perspective on the relative contribution of private and public health measures:
What was the biggest health care breakthrough in the last 40 years in the United States? Heart bypasses? CAT scans and M.R.I.’s? New cancer treatments?
No, it was the cigarette tax. Every 10 percent price increase on cigarettes reduced sales by about 3 percent over all, and 7 percent among teenagers, according to the 2005 book “Prescription for a Healthy Nation.” Just the 1983 increase in the federal tax on cigarettes saved 40,000 lives per year. In effect, the most promising cure for lung cancer didn’t emerge from a medical research lab but from money-grubbing politicians. Likewise, the best cure for obesity may turn out to be not a pill but a tax.
Kelli K. Garcia’s article Fat Fight supports this macro-level approach to fighting obesity. Given the enormous weight of evidence behind situational approaches, and the failure of both the market and state subsidies to increase consumption of healthier food, this type of Pigovian tax appears to be the ideal approach to deterring weight gain and unsustainable eating practices. The propaganda power of “Big Food” can overwhelm even the strong-willed.
Image Credit: Callejero/J. Holzer.
December 23, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Posted in: Health Law
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Responses (5)
Behringer - December 23, 2008 at 2:31 pm
junk food lobby is very powerful, so powerful that they’d easily defeat something like this if it ever made it to congress (state or fed).
Daniel S. Goldberg - December 23, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Hi Frank,
Two quick points: first, I think one should be careful of introducing martial metaphors into discussions of health, for reasons Sontag so eloquently described. Inevitably, it becomes impossible to separate the enemy as an entity from the body which “houses” the entity, and the enemy tends to become the person him or herself. Given the unbelievable stigma fat people encounter, I think there is even more reason to consciously eschew military metaphors with regard to fatness.
Second, as I’ve tried to document on MH Blog, it’s important to understand the tenuousness of the causal connections between fatness and poor health. The relationship is extraordinarily complicated, much, much more so than dominant narratives and representations typically allow for. Some fat people are, as best we can tell, quite healthy, and some are not. Risk factors are not equivalent to illness, and the relationship between fatness and poor health is nowhere near as certain as is often presumed.
Ken JP Stuczynski - December 24, 2008 at 7:46 pm
If we are asking the government to do social-behavioral manipulation through taxation, the debate to be had is if the end justifies the means.
The implications of such governmental power are twofold: First, I’m not the type to tout out the slippery slope analogy, but the question of where it will end must be answered with a qualitative line drawn somewhere to protect myriad things many people consider personal freedom of choice.
The second is the assumption that the government not only can be trusted to know best, but act in our own best interest without undue inappropriate influence. If they have any rightful authority to do social engineering of any kind “for our own good” it assumes they have both the resources and ethics to consistently make decisions based on well-established professional opinion, and the ability to make them in spite of either special interests or even worse — as your accompanying image suggests — popular sentiment.
Therefore, I suggest that the ends may be noble, but the means questionable, and would posit alternative approaches such as education that take a few generations, but place the ultimate decision in the hands of the individual, not the state. And perhaps the means need not even be deliberate, as the flow of information has never been more free and available. Better yet, and to avoid state-funded propaganda for better or worse, perhaps all that need be done is concentrate education toward developing the skills to discern and comprehend such information available from all sources, popular and dissenting.
A.W. - December 29, 2008 at 8:51 am
Mmm, a scene from South Park:
> Father: You see, son, we live in a liberal democratic society. The Democrats created sexual harassment law, which tells us what we can and cannot say in the workplace, and what we can and cannot do in the workplace.
> Kyle: But isn’t that fascism?
> Father: No, because we don’t call it fascism.
Miriam - January 2, 2009 at 2:22 pm
A.W.
That is not only irrelevant it is also offensive. Your right to throw a punch ends at my nose. In the same way you don’t have a right to sexually harass people. That is not fascism, that is called living in a just society.
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