Hey, I’m back. I was afraid for a while that I didn’t have
anything else to say on the topic of weight, but it turns out I was just really
tired. A combination of work stress and being too darned busy in general left
me kind of burned out this spring. I’ve been working on carving out more time
for rest and reflection recently and it seems that my thoughts are starting to
flow again.
While I was on my mini-hiatus, the American Medical
Association announced that they had decided to classify obesity as a disease.
There was a lot of buzz about this, with some seeing it as a good step and
others not so sure. My reaction was pretty ho-hum. I suppose anything that gets
doctors and insurance companies to pay more attention to weight and health is a
good thing, but it seemed a bit beside the point. This might sound like an odd
thing for me to say, but it’s really not. To understand, let’s compare obesity
to something else. Say, lung cancer.
Lung cancer is a disease. We all agree on that, right? Well,
what if medical science developed a whole range of highly effective treatments
for lung cancer, yet we ignored the issue of smoking. People would continue to
get lung cancer, by hey, never fear, we can treat it! You don’t mind spending a
few months (or years) as a prisoner of the medical system, do you?
This is what obesity-as-a-disease, without a serious attempt
to address our hyper-saturated food culture, seems like to me. The drug companies
will still make big bucks on each new “breakthrough” diet drug. Hospitals will
still market (and profit from) new “breakthrough” bariatric surgeries. And many
people, most likely an ever-increasing number of people, will still struggle
with the painful consequences of excess weight. Unless, I believe, we start
looking seriously at rational public policies, similar to the types of public
policies we implemented regarding smoking, that address the harm created by
treating food as a mere consumer choice, divorced from any moral responsibility
for the long-term health of the people who eat it.
Oh dear, I’m not proposing to take away your freedom to
drink a big soda, am I? Or
to eat Twinkies to your heart’s content once they come back on the market?
Of course not. Eat and drink whatever you like. What I am proposing is that you
have all the facts on the substances you’re taking into your body and what they
might do to you. And let’s go one step further. What if Hostess took a small
percentage of the enormous profits they will reap from sale of Twinkies and
used it to do something good, say fund programs for childhood nutrition
education?
Now, that I could
get excited about.
