It shouldn't be a surprise that people are getting fatter. Increased wealth and technology lead to more easily available food, and people, like dogs, will typically eat whatever is put in front of them. Only a leftist who has never had to struggle for survival would see this as a bad circumstance crying out for government intervention.
Obesity has reached pandemic proportions throughout the world and is now the greatest single contributor to chronic disease, an international conference was told here."This insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity is now engulfing the entire world," Australia's Monash University professor Paul Zimmet, chair of the 10th International Congress on Obesity, said on the opening day of the conference. ...
Zimmet said the problem needed urgent solutions -- not just widespread changes to diet and exercise but the rethinking of national policies on urban and social planning, agriculture policy, education, transport and other areas.
How about if governments just leave us all alone to get as fat as we care to and to die from whatever cause we want?
As long as us skinny people don't have to pay for it, I'm on board.
Actually it seems that rich people are thin because they have the time and money to stay that way. Look at Oprah with her personal cook. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Your weight is your personal responsibility.
Actually, if your weight interferes with your taxability, the state will definitely take an interest. Fat people who die too early and don't pay enough to the fisc are a menace to the continued employment of bureaucrats. Once looked at from that angle, the nanny state is an inevitability outside of libertarianism.
If you want your right to hohos to remain unmolested, you're simply going to have to keep government spending *way* down.
No, no, it's a "public health" issue, which means all of your behavior is subject to government regulation.
The personal is the political, and by extension, governable.
Only Poor People Are Skinny
Actually not true...unhealthy food is actually much cheaper than healthy food. Just compare prices at Taco Bell to Subway to see the difference.
How about if governments just leave us all alone to get as fat as we care to and to die from whatever cause we want?
You probably don't want to hear this, but obesity does cost the government money. There are direct costs like medicare/medicaid money to care for people who are overweight and the various ailments that brings.
There are also indirect costs to the people as a whole...if you happen to work at a company with a lot of obese people, your company's health care costs will rise. This could cause your company to cancel its health plan or increase out of pocket to you..even though you did nothing to cause the increase. Companies are also incurring extra expense to deal with obesity, like airlines reconfiguring seats, which ultimately cost skinny people as well as the obese.
Manish: All those costs to healthy people are the result of forcibly lumping them with the fat people. If the government weren't so intrusive -- i.e., no Medicare/Medicaid etc. -- then fewer people would have to bear the burden of other peoples' problems. The issue would still exist in the corporate world as you describe, perhaps, unless companies were allowed to fire people for being too unhealthy (which would certainly be illegal now).
Michael..we are forcibly lumped together as is..its called insurance. Group employment policies, which are the norm, don't allow for individual underwriting which means that you have the same insurance rates as the obese folks in your company.
Even if we went to a model of individual insurance with individual underwriting, its the obese who wouldn't be able to afford insurance and then cost the rest of us by getting care by going to the emergency room and then not paying up.
Manish: My point is that we wouldn't be lumped together with unhealthy people, if there weren't so much government intrusion. The point of insurance is to share risk, so obviously we're going to be lumped to some degree, and someone in the lump will have the most risk and someone will have the least. The point is to reduce that difference by tailoring the groups.
A certain type of person who just can't accept other people's foibles and leave them alone should be disenfranchised. They do not understand the responsibilities inherent in a presumption of liberty.
Michael: As Manish indicated, fattening foods are cheaper. Specifically, foods that are high in simple carbohydrates, like corn syrup and white flour, are very cheap in the US because corn and wheat are so easy to grow here. Sugar is also pretty cheap, even though we import it. So, if a person is so impoverished that he can barely afford food, then ironically, he may have trouble staying slim. His glucose levels will fluctuate wildly, and his fat cells will retain energy to moderate the variations.
However, most people who load up on simple carbohydrates do it for the taste and the burst of energy, not for lack of money.
The parade of bad health from cheap food isn't limited to simple carbs either. It's also about the kinds of fats that are in them. Cheap foods often contain lots of trans fats because it increases the shelf life. Look at the nutrition facts on a bag of WalMart-brand tortilla chips and compare them to those on a bag of more expensive tortilla chips. The WalMart chips feature trans fats.. others don't. Fast food is also full of trans fats, although they are improving.