Governing through Reason
Solving the Obesity Problem
Pauly spends a lot of time swimming around in his pond, pondering the problems of the world. 
Being a particularly perspicacious political platypus, he is a problem-solver par excellence. Pauly’s latest offering is one of his very best. Our platypus proposes a solution to the obesity problem in America: legalizing pot!
It turns out that fatty foods stimulate the same chemical releases in the brain as marijuana, which is why it’s so hard for you to eat just one potato chip. So, Pauly argues, it follows that if pot is legal, everybody will forgo the fatty faux-chemicals and go straight for the real thing (which is non-fattening.) If legal pot is properly taxed, it could solve the deficit, obesity and skyrocketing health care costs, all in one toke… er, stroke.
Pauly accepts your grateful accolades with his usual grace and humility. “Aw shucks, t’aint nuthin’,” he murmurs shyly, twirling a webbed toe in the mud.
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I think Pauly is just kidding around here… he’s such a playful platypus
… but there is some serious news on the obesity front today.Rose, who is one of our thoughtful commenters, suggested this some time ago, and it is apparently beginning to get looked at seriously… the idea that parents should lose custody of obese children.
It seems extreme… but stuffing kids full of unhealthy food, clogging their arteries and making them candidates for early heart disease, diabetes and obesity surgery is certainly a genuine form of child abuse and neglect. If parents were, for instance, slowly poisoning their children with arsenic or feeding them ground glass in their cereal, the kids would be removed from that home… right?
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The problem is that arsenic and ground glass are easy bright-line scenarios. The number of instances where it is acceptable to feed those to your children is zero.
The same cannot be said for a Whopper with cheese. Yes, having it every day, along with a large fries and supersized Coke, is a terrible thing to do to your kid. But your 12-year-old son having it once a month? Certainly nothing approaching child abuse.
Where do you draw the line? How do you draw the line? Who draws that line?
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@Michael.. But your 12-year-old son having it once a month? Certainly nothing approaching child abuse.
What about your 12-year-old son having a BMI of 32, incipient liver disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and significant atherosclerosis.
Is that not child abuse?
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filistro,
What about your 12-year-old son having a BMI of 32, incipient liver disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and significant atherosclerosis.
Is that not child abuse?
I notice you carefully dodged my questions. So I’ll restate based on the situation you outlined above. How high does the BMI have to be before you take action? How far along the path to disease? These are fuzzy-logic questions, unlike the arsenic and ground glass questions, which were binary.
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@Michael.. How high does the BMI have to be before you take action? How far along the path to disease? These are fuzzy-logic questions..
Human problems… especially those involving helpless victims, as children always are… can’t be solved with slide rules and calipers. Nevertheless, they can and must be solved. We manage as a society to develop guidelines for intervention in other “fuzzy logic” situations… like, where do we define the difference between a “good spanking” that is nobody’s business but the family’s… and abusive discipline that requires intervention from authorities?
That’s just as hard to determine… but an essential distinction nonetheless. There are some situations where we can’t abdicate societal responsibility just because setting guidelines is going to be difficult.
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We’ll have to wait for the release of Seven Deadly Synapses which will, of course, change the world.
Oh wait — the “Gluttony” chapter is already available. Well, there we are.
Michael and fili both have excellent points. Gluttony and Lust are difficult sins because they are sins of degree, not of kind. That is, we all need to eat, and we all need to reproduce. We’re hard-wired for those things, and for good reason.
It’s when those hard-wired drives get out of control that we get into trouble.
My preferred solution is not the same as fili’s, but I think it would have the same result. I would fund health care in part through a tax on the caloric and fat content of foods. For example, when I was in Weight Watchers, the Points system was based on calories; there was a surcharge for fat and a discount for fiber. That “priced” the food at close to its true “value” as nutrition.
We can calculate the cost to society of each additional calorie, and each additional fat gram, in terms of type II diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, and heart disease. We can roll that tax back into health care for all Americans if we have a single-payer plan. Rather than a massive social engineering plan, we make the price of a choice transparent.
Right now, a Big Mac ($2) costs the same as five oranges (40 cents each). I like a Big Mac once in a blue moon, but it should cost $10 (just making numbers up, don’t quote me). An orange should cost me 40 cents.
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#8 written by mclever 1 year ago
Michael,
Many people will just say, “we know obesity when we see it” and be satisfied with that, but I’m with you that we need to be careful about how we make those determinations, because people’s perceptions of “fat” vs “not-fat” vary widely. The extremes are obvious–parents who feed their kids through a tube like foie gras are clearly abusive, and such children have been successfully and rightfully removed from those situations under existing guidelines. However, the decision to remove a child from a home should never be made lightly. The foster system is no picnic–they might end up with Michelle Bachmann for a mother! (just kidding)
Let’s consider the opposite condition. Starving a child is abusive, right? Child Protective Services can and does remove a child from the home if the child is neglected and underfed. But, how do we determine when the improper nutrition for the child reaches the level of neglect or abuse? What are the criteria that CPS must consider before making any effort to remove the child from the home?
We might assume there are clear guidelines, but a quick perusal of several states’ CPS procedures reveals an inconsistent mishmash of subjective nonsense that basically comes down to the opinions of over-worked caseworkers and judicial appeals based on “I know it when I see it.” I think this is deplorable, actually. On both the underfed/starvation and the overfed/stuffed ends of the spectrum.
It’s similar to the judgment call with spanking. An occasional swat on the behind is usually considered OK (except for the fiercest anti-spanking crusaders), but there’s a point where even the pro-spanking crowd admits that the swats are too frequent and too harsh. However, there is no law that specifies a certain rate or force as abusive. It’s entirely subjective and based more on a given social worker’s impression of the child’s emotional and psychological state than on the parents’ specific actions.
I think, especially with something as emotionally-charged as weight, that leaving it entirely subjective is a dangerous proposal. I’ve tried to consider what I think a reasonable “bright line” could be, but it’s not easy. Perhaps something based on BMI or percent body fat measures. Perhaps the ADA or NIH pediatric guidelines could start as a baseline, but we’d need a child to be at least 2 standard deviations outside of the “normal” range for their age and height before government intervention could even be considered. There would need to be allowances for variations in bone structure and body type…and even then there would need to be physician buy-in that the child’s health is being seriously, purposefully endangered. I’ve seen skinny kids that ate like horses and heavier kids who hardly ate at all, so sometimes it’s not anything the parents are doing wrong. Removing the child should never be “automatic” in any case.
While I do think there are times when overstuffing the kid is abusive, I don’t see the threat of removing kids from their homes as an effective tool for fighting childhood obesity. The problem is more endemic to society than “bad parents” who “abuse” their kids with food. I would want to be very, very careful before making it general policy to remove “fat” kids from their ostensibly “abusive” homes.
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#9 written by mclever 1 year ago
@Monotreme
I think the idea of nutritionally-based pricing is an interesting one. If the “nutrition tax” were used to subsidize healthier foods, like fruit and vegetables (and/or fund a single-payer health care system), then that could be a very effective social engineering mechanism.
I’m just not sure our country is ready for what many would decry as “nanny state,” no matter how effective or necessary it might be. We’ll probably need to reach that crisis of 50% obesity rates before Americans decide to collectively do something as a society.
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My feeling is that this idea would be terrifyingly intrusive. It is exactly the sort of slippery-slope outcome that we’ve been warned against. And I say “outcome” on purpose — I don’t need to make an argument that “removing a children from their homes because obesity is a form of abuse” will lead to worse ideas. The idea is already offensive enough on its own that it needs no further slope down which to slip.
A much better alternative — and less expensive — would be to provide nutrition counseling, dietary supplements, and an exercise plan — if necessary, a meal plan and free vegetables covered the same way as prescription drugs — as a matter of course, as part of standard universal insurance coverage. No, I haven’t thought much about the details. But the family doctor should be more than capable of prescribing and monitoring this aspect of a child’s health.
Yes, it currently is not feasible — too few doctors, too few dollars devoted to the purpose. But those are both fixable, and far more cheaply, and with far less threat to privacy and other rights, than expanding foster care and the reach and power of Child Protective Services.
I sometimes tease rightists for their rhetoric about “totalitarianism” when they’re objecting to a 3% rise in income taxes on the obscenely wealthy. But I think this is one of the places where the word can be productively and accurately used. I can think of few things (not none but few) more “totalitarian” than giving the state the power to take your child away because he or she doesn’t eat right or doesn’t exercise enough.
There are far, far better ways of encouraging healthy habits. Taking children away is a frighteningly dystopian idea worthy of Brave New World.
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Now that’s just silly. Everyone knows that marijuana gives you the munchies. I’d be expecting pot to give a pot belly.