Over the weekend, political columnist Kathleen Parker had an opinion piece in the Washington Post entitled, “Health Reform and Obesity – Eat, Drink and Watch Out” in which she argues that the federal government should have no role in solving the obesity crisis. Instead, Parker harkens back to an earlier, simpler time, and concludes that, “[a]s with most problems, the solution is family:”
Ma would say: “Sit up and eat your vegetables.” Pa said: “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”
Other common utterances included: “Go outside and play.” And, “After you finish your chores.”
Families may not have been happier . . . but neither were the words “childhood obesity” part of the vernacular.
We know that family dinners do play a role in preventing childhood obesity (here’s a recent study to support that notion, one not cited by Parker), and since TLT’s inception, I’ve been regularly writing about and encouraging weeknight family meals, including providing tips and recipes to help readers pull them off. But to say that family dinners are the sole solution to the mounting obesity crisis, and that government has no role in the matter, is like suggesting we use a squirt gun to battle a four-alarm blaze.
What Parker fears, apparently, is a Big Government nanny scolding freedom-loving Americans about their “unattractive” eating habits:
The same strategy that created pariahs out of smokers now is being aimed at people who eat unattractively. It isn’t only that you’re hurting yourself by eating too much of the wrong foods; you’re hurting the rest of us by willfully contributing to your own poor health and therefore to the cost of public health. Fat is the new nicotine.
Once the numbers crunchers start quantifying the cost to society incurred by people who eat too much ($100 billion a year, according to one estimate), you can be sure that not-such-good-things are coming your way soon. Think Nurse Ratched in an apron.
Yet the only examples of governmental regulation offered by Parker are some cities outlawing trans fats (a man-made substance injected into our food supply by Big Food solely to improve product shelf life, with indisputable ill effects on consumers’ health) and the current USDA effort to limit the number of times potatoes can be served in school lunches per week (hmm . . . so that would be a case of Big Government interfering with . . . oh yeah, a governmental program.)
If that’s all Nurse Ratched has up her starched apron, I’m not sure why Parker is so worried.
But of course, unlike Parker, I would support other governmental efforts to combat what she herself admits is an “alarming” problem. She mentions, for example, “the high cost of healthy food (rent ‘Food Inc.’ for an overview) vs. cheap, fast food” as a factor contributing to the problem, but quickly concludes that it’s “[o]ur drive-through culture, which applies to relationships as well as mealtimes” that “is the real enemy of fitness and health.” Um, what about the governmental subsidies that make that fast food so cheap? Why are we ignoring the underlying conditions that create this odd paradox, and then blaming people for making the financially (if not nutritionally) rational decision to choose a Big Mac over a meal of fresh produce and free-range chicken?
Parker also glosses over the fact that when it comes to making food choices, the playing field is not a level one. She writes:
Personally, I wouldn’t touch a trans fat if you wrapped it in gold and sprinkled it with diamonds, but this is because I can read, comprehend, digest, recall and act on the free will allotted to all sentient adults. In the absence of willpower among some, should trans fats be forbidden to all? Where exactly does one stop drawing that little line?
Does Parker really believe that, as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with a masters degree, she stands in the shoes of most consumers trying to make sound food choices? Even well-educated adults are often led astray by product claims (e.g., TLT interviewee Dr. Brian Wansink has shown that simply slapping “organic” on a cookie label leads college students to believe they are consuming approximately 40 percent fewer calories and getting more fiber) and those claims are backed by, literally, billions of marketing dollars. For consumers less educated than Parker and Wansink’s subjects, trying to navigate the sometimes deliberately confusing information on product packaging, while sifting through the deluge of often-conflicting information about nutrition in the media, all while being subjected to an unrelenting marketing blitz, is a formidable challenge.
Parker concludes by recommending that readers visit a website, www. togethercounts.com, a campaign to encourage personal responsibility. The site was created by the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, which Parker tells us is “a coalition of 160 organizations.” I was curious about who these “organizations” were, so I Googled its board of directors and discovered a veritable Who’s Who of Big Food– representatives of Nestle, Kellogg’s, Kraft, Hershey, Coke, Mars, Sara Lee, Kraft, the Grocery Manufacturers Association and more. That doesn’t make the foundation’s efforts inherently worthless, but it’s notable that those now urging moderation and personal responsibility are the very entities whose products have contributed significantly to the present problem. (See also this scathing critique of the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation from Michele Simon of Appetite for Profit).
Bottom line: Parker rejects the tobacco analogy when it comes to the obesity crisis whereas I accept it fully. If we’re serious about reversing the alarming rise in childhood and adult obesity in America, Nurse Ratched needs to step up her game.
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Grace @eatdinner says
Thanks again to TLT to taking a balanced, productive approach to this ongoing discussion of personal responsibility, government intervention and the obesity epidemic. I promote family dinner at eatdinner.org; I wholeheartedly believe in the health benefits of family meals. Nonetheless, I think that reasonable people can embrace the idea that BOTH government intervention and personal responsibility are needed to solve the obesity epidemic.
Let us acknowledge first that we did not get here “organically” without any government intervention. Government intervention is behind corn subsidies, behind automobile and highway subsidies, and behind cheap, processed food for school lunches, to name just a few instances. People do not make their food choices in a vacuum; they are influenced by their environment, their education, and their access to healthy food and to places to safely exercise. The government can help in multiple ways with education, with forward thinking school and transportation policies, and, yes, with regulation of unhealthy foods and/or with reformed subsidies to promote healthy food. Maybe there could even be workplace policies that could help parents get home for dinner! The nanny-state argument is a red herring. At the end of the day, individuals will ultimately decide what to eat, whether or not to actually eat together as families, and whether or not to exercise.
The government is largely picking up the tab for the high cost of obesity and it is sensible, from a public health perspective and an economic one, to finally acknowledge the alarming trend of obesity and try to find ways to reverse it.
Renee says
People like this columnist really amaze me. It’s as if she’s being paid by the same corporations that sponsor the website she’s promoting. And who knows, with the way the corporate threads are entangled in everything now, maybe she is!
Karen says
We can take the tobacco analogy even further by recalling how Big Tobacco served up marketing for their products with health and well-being front and center. In fact, early television commercials had doctors, white coat and all, talking on camera about the health benefits from cigarettes. This occurred AFTER the link between smoking and lung cancer was quite clearly identified.
Nilam says
This opinion piece, er… what reads as food company PR, is borderline ridiculous. Government has a role in protecting it’s citizens (public health: safe drinkable water, waste management, road safety, gun safety, etc, etc). This argument about personal responsibility when it comes to food and health falls apart quickly when you see the progress governmental oversight has had on other wide-reaching programs (vaccines, drinking water, seat beat laws, emergency preparedness, evidence-based sexual health information). Families should be supported in making the right food and health decisions – and that can come from public policies that are implemented by governments – to make changes to the built environment, and by regulation. The article would have been way better off being up front about the link and new organization by just stating that private food companies are succumbing to governmental and public pressure to offer healthier items. Regardless of how food companies respond, they are under enormous pressure to change the way they sell food (and government, academia, and public health are moving that forward).
Dana Woldow says
More of the same mentality here
http://tinyurl.com/3cx74xs
Makes the tobacco analogy too.
“What is apparent is that the militant enemies of fast food would like it treated as a public health menace along the lines of tobacco. They want broad measures to restrict, discourage, and punish the companies that sell it.”
Theresa says
That’s all well and good–government encouraging (but forcing?) food corporations to provide healthier options. And I agree that corn subsidies are a root cause of many of our dietary woes. But if you give the federal government a say in what can be produced and sold, where do you start and where do you stop? Are Cheerios okay but Honey Nut Cheerios are not? Corn Flakes get the green light but Frosted Flakes are to be banned? Even Texas is looking at taxing soda because of the sugar content, but if you tax soda, will you tax a bag of sugar and every candy maker and every ice cream company . . . .? How about all those donut shops on every corner? You can’t have it both ways–some sugary or fatty things are bad, but others are okay? I have to agree that it’s the parents’ responsibility. Bad food is out there, and lots of people want it. I’d love it if Halloween were to disappear (a holiday encouraging kids to beg for junk food? Puh-lease, whose idea was this?), but is that what we are electing people for? Junk food, junk t.v., junk music, we’re surrounded by junk. I’m not looking to our illustrious senators and representatives for guidance in nurturing and raising my children. I believe it’s up to parents and individuals to rescue themselves.
Bettina Elias Siegel says
I agree, Theresa, that governmental regulation could go way too far and I’m not advocating a Federal Food Police. I absolutely support personal choice and the freedom to eat whatever you want, regardless of the health consequences.
But it’s clear that the government already plays a significant role in what Americans eat and don’t eat — I think Grace’s comment above summed that up well. Government can create incentives and deterrents for individuals and corporations, it sets agricultural policy, it runs the National School Lunch Program. Those are the places I would want to focus on, along with tighter rules on marketing to children and things like that. But I certainly do not want to see government telling a company that Honey Nut Cheerios are OK but Sugar Pops are not.
Theresa says
I think essentially we are on the same page, except that I am skeptical that the government, at the federal lever in particular, can or even should have a much greater say in what companies produce. I’d love to see pressure on corporations to make better food, and for schools to serve healthier food. My kids have never eaten in a McDonald’s and I don’t see why so many people think good eating is so hard to accomplish. You make a good point that Parker may assume consumers are better informed about choices than they really are, and that packaging can be misleading, and often intentionally so. All natural applesauce can still have sugar added, ditto peanut butter. Still, the information is out there and government can’t micromanage the food industry. Subsidies have caused harm in the past, in part responsible for the troubles we face now, so I have less confidence than Grace, I guess, that more government, and again I stress federal, is what we really need. I recently lived in France where all food ads had to run a disclaimer at the bottom regarding eating and exercise, akin to our alcohol label warnings regarding pregnancy. It’s all very “slippery slope-ish,” with no easy answer, and what bothers me where do the lines get drawn between healthy and unhealthy, and who makes those calls? Which leads us back to education, access to information, and parental choices.
Glad a friend led me to your blog.
Theresa
Mary Lawton says
This op-ed infuriated me!! Thank you so much for commenting, TLT. People need to be regulated for god’s sake. When I was out to eat last week, there was a revolving door of movement at the soda fountain. Person after overweight person, large styrofoam cup in hands, filling up with soda at the beverage station. It went on literally all through my dinner and was so distracting to me, but I’m sure no one else noticed. It’s so much the norm now, no one can even imagine not doing it. Just have water for god’s sake. Or don’t feed your child a damn snack every five seconds. Can anyone recall seeing a child in a stroller WITHOUT A SNACK??? I can’t.
Someone or something big has to get hold of this and help us understand how to feed ourselves, because we sure as hell don’t know anymore. Enter Nurse Ratched, PLEASE.
Justin Gagnon says
I can’t agree with Mary above that “people need to be regulated”. They don’t need to be regulated, they need to be educated. Many parents who have kids in strollers sucking on plastic tubes of “organic” mashed fruit don’t need to be regulated. They think they are doing their child a great service by not only giving them “real” fruit, but giving them organic fruit. They’re not thinking about the fact that they’re obfuscating “real food” and not setting their children up for better eating habits down the line. A bag of grapes would do just fine. Cut in half, of course.
I don’t think we need more regulation of food. Food companies and manufacturers will always come up with a way to stay one step ahead of the government. What we DO need is to overhaul our system of grain subsidies that is the underpinning of cheap food. Instead of taxing junk on the back end, we need to attack the government subsidies that make junk food cheap on the front end.
Bettina Elias Siegel says
Justin – Absolutely, and I hope this came across in my post. I certainly don’t want to regulate at the micro level, telling companies what they can and can’t offer, or telling people what the can and can’t eat. But I do think there’s a role for government at the macro level (where it already has great influence over our food) such as corn and soy subsidies, the National School Lunch Program (and the related use of surplus farm commodities), etc. I might also support incentives and disincentives that push people in the right direction, like soda taxes, although I haven’t thought that through fully. And I certainly feel we could be doing a better job regulating the marketing of food directly to kids, as I’ve written about a lot here on TLT.
Justin Gagnon says
Totally agree, Bettina. And yes, this came across in the post. I had already moved on from the post and was commenting on the comments 🙂
Bettina Elias Siegel says
🙂
Wendy says
From another former lawyer…
Was also surprised that no mention was made that Healthy Weight Commitment is composed of corporations. That lapse took away her credibility esp for someone in her position. Great job!
Bettina Elias Siegel says
Wendy: I was saying that to someone and they were giving Paker the benefit of the doubt, like maybe in the word count she had, it was hard to get into all that. But, STILL. Seems like a pretty big omission, doesn’t it, especially when she referred to them as “organizations”? At any rate, thanks for coming by TLT — I think my former HLS classmate Karen sent you here? And I want to check out your blog, too!
Betsy (Eco-novice) says
Amen. That op-ed sounds kind of hilarious. As if the obesity crisis had been created by the free market. The obesity crisis is in large part a product of haywire government regulation and incentives as well as special interests. And if it’s not the government’s job to make sure that non-food weird stuff isn’t injected into the food supply without the public’s knowledge, whose is it?