Want to know about unintended consequences and what they can do to you and society in general? Look no further than the sudden interest in the obesity crisis. From Michele Obama’s campaign for fitness and backyard gardens to NY Mayor Bloomberg’s war against soda, the government’s major push is against fat.
And its working. According to Gallup, 81 percent of us think obesity is an “extremely serious” or “very serious” social problem. All fine and good, if you ignore that while I was in high school, it was a national crisis that all the girls were developing eating disorders based on unfair media images of women.
The sad thing is, only 67 percent of us rate cigarettes as “extremely serious” or “very serious.” I say sad, because - without getting into the nitty gritty details - using cigarettes is roughly twice as bad for you as being obese. Cigarettes raises your risk of disease 4x, while being obese only raises is 2x. And being just a little overweight actually lowers your risk of dying below 1 (where 1 = average risk) while using cigarettes only occasionally actually puts you at the same risk as an obese person.
The government not only permits cigarettes, it provides manufacturers with tax breaks. Meanwhile, it also helped promote the obesity crisis by pushing low fat, high carb diets as the food choice du jour.
Having promoted both problems, it now tamps down slightly on the most dangerous, while launching an all out war on the less dangerous problem. Most likely because it has run out of ways to shame hard-core smokers, while the social stigma against being obese allows it target them without problem.
I think your last paragraph about sums it up. There's no "money" in trying to stop smokers (although some groups still work hard at it). Plus, how many people don't know about smoking being bad vs people knowing obesity having negative consequences?
ReplyDeleteFor the whole fight the fat thing, I'd much rather have Obama's "be active and eat healthfully" than "NO SODA, IS BAD, MUST BAN". Obviously there is some huge overlap, but I think educating, encouraging and enabling people to eat healthier will be better long term than telling people they can't/shouldn't do something.
I'm pretty sure the "give a man a fish" parable would apply here.
I think of the "fish" parable so often, because so many of our answers seem to be about giving a fish rather than teaching fishing.
ReplyDeleteSo many of our programs seek to make us feel good by, say, giving money to the poor in the form of food stamps. But that often has the unintended consequence - the person getting the money remains poor and still unskilled. Meanwhile, the benefits go away the second your condition improves even a little. So while the "rich" feel better, but you've essentially trapped the poor person in poverty. We've essentially made tobacco and corn farmers rich, while encouraging the poor to smoke and eat simple sugars. Having made them fat smokers, we now aim to scold them about it.
I'm not sure many people don't know that obesity is bad at this point, but its open for debate, I suppose.