How Increasing Our Obesity Rate is Becoming Federal Policy

Obesity rates in America are higher than ever.

This is the conclusion in a new Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report entitled F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America’s Future.   Released last week, the document notes that one-third of children and two-thirds of adults are now obese or overweight. 

Obesity is no minor health matter.  It is linked to disease, disability, and premature death.

The report received some media attention for a couple of days, but then we had our fill of it.  It faded into the news background largely because we’ve heard the story before. 

No one disputes the two major causes of obesity in America.  Americans take in too many calories, and work off too few.

If we accept these causes at face value, the story ends as we decide that weight is a matter of individual – not governmental – responsibility. 

The individual choice argument is a powerful one for those who do not think that the government needs to “interfere” with people’s food and exercise choices.  But it’s wrong.

The forces of governmental inaction regarding the food we eat are powerful. 

First, the “freedom to choose” argument is the same argument the Tobacco Institute used successfully against governmental regulation of smoking for many years.  Smoking was “an adult custom,” the argument went.  Two-thirds of people chose not to smoke, and those who did should be left alone.

Despite overwhelming evidence about the harmful effects of smoking, it took almost thirty years to overcome most of the prejudice against governmental regulation of smoking in public places.

Second, there is an even stronger prejudice against governmental action regarding weight, because weight doesn’t have second hand effects like smoking.  On the contrary, the weight debate often devolves into an argument about the extremes.  Isn’t it worse to be morbidly underweight than it is to be morbidly overweight?  Many people think so.  Morbid underweight even carries a diagnostic label, anorexia, with no real counterpart on the opposite end of the scale.

When former Surgeon General David Satcher issued a call to action against obesity in 2001, the nation responded by grabbing a snack, taking a seat, and tuning him out.  In a Forward to the RWJF report, he writes that 12% of children were overweight in 2001.  The percentage tripled over the next decade.  Three out of every five adults were overweight in 2001.  Two out of three are today.

So why are we so bad at exercising our individual responsibility to eat well? 

Governmental action, or in this case, inaction, may have something to do with it.  As individuals, we are doing some things right, like eating more fruits, vegetables, and milk products today than we did a generation ago.

But the biggest weight culprit may have nothing to do with individual choice.  It appears to be the sugars added during processing to the foods we eat, and the government’s failure to use its own data to regulate this added sugar effectively.

A recent USDA report notes that Americans now consume 30 teaspoons of added sugars every day.  These are often added to our foods during manufacturing, long before we reach for our own sugar bowls.  They add the equivalent of 477 total calories to our daily diet.  We’re hooked on added sugars, which may well be the nicotine of the 21^st century.

Food manufacturers start spooning added sugars into our mouths early in our lives.  Baby foods need no added sugars.  According to another  USDA report published in 2006, however, more than half of the sugars in babies’ teething biscuits were added sugars, as were two-thirds in a “fruit supreme” baby dessert.

We expect sweet desserts, but some non-dessert products have even more added sugars.  Frozen lemonade from concentrate had more added sugar per 100 grams of carbohydrates than cinnamon raisin sweet rolls or chocolate glazed donuts.  A “low calorie” Caesar dressing had almost as much added sugar as a jelly donut.

Telling us to eat less is just background noise when we’re pumping empty calories into our manufactured foods.

Our government should report on, and regulate, the sugars and other substances that are added to our foods.  But the USDA agency program that produced the two reports lost 10% of its funding in 2010.  It will suffer much deeper cuts if the USDA budget passed by the House in June is approved as part of the deficit reduction deal.

This program area accounts for 2% of USDA spending, and 8/100ths of one percent of the US Federal budget.  Eliminating the program area entirely would close the deficit by two-tenths of 1%.

Without information or regulation, the sugars will keep coming whether we want them or not.  And we’ll continue to get fat.

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