A Big Fat Target: From Parody to Reality

by | May 27, 2003 | POLITICS

Six years ago, after tobacco companies agreed to settle lawsuits filed by the states, the Wall Street Journal published what seemed at the time to be a hilarious parody by Mark Bernstein. It was titled “A Big Fat Target.” The parody claimed that junk food sellers would be next on the list for lawsuits, as […]

Six years ago, after tobacco companies agreed to settle lawsuits filed by the states, the Wall Street Journal published what seemed at the time to be a hilarious parody by Mark Bernstein.

It was titled “A Big Fat Target.” The parody claimed that junk food sellers would be next on the list for lawsuits, as well as Wisconsin Cheese Lords for clogging arteries and makers of exciting movies for encouraging a sedentary lifestyle. Bernstein concluded, “It is too hot to exercise. Dieting demands willpower, and why bother if you’re just a victim? Come on, America. Get off that couch and sue.”

I am indebted to Michael Krauss of George Mason University, who referred to the Bernstein piece in a legal backgrounder for Washington Legal Foundation this year. It was, as Bernstein himself wrote, “a bit preposterous.”

Now move to August 2000: the parody newspaper, The Onion, headlined, “Hershey’s Ordered to Pay Obese Americans $135 Billion.” The company, said The Onion, “knowingly and willfully” marketed to children “rich, fatty candy bars containing chocolate and other ingredients of negligible nutritional value” while “spiking” them with “peanuts, crisped rice and caramel to increase consumer appeal.”

Fast forward to 2001. Journalists began calling John Banzhaf, the George Washington University professor who led the anti-smoking legal crusade from its early stages. “Would tobacco-style lawsuits,” they wondered, “now be aimed at food processors and restaurants?”

“Well, no,” Banzhaf later recalled he said. “There are important differences.” For example, food, unlike tobacco or asbestos, is something everyone needs to live.

But look where we are today. The parody has become reality.

Recent evidence: Lawsuits filed last year by several fat children, looking for restitution from fast-food restaurants. At first, a suit in New York was tossed out of court by Judge Robert Sweet, who said, “Nobody is forced to eat at McDonald’s.” (Or, to put it more clearly: No one is forced to eat the most fattening items on the McDonald’s menu, as opposed to the no-cal soft drinks and the salads.) But Sweet then offered some advice on how to revise the suit to make it more palatable.

Banzhaf has utterly changed his mind. He’s now leading the charge.

But the lawsuits, as crazy as they are, are simply one manifestation of the hysteria surrounding obesity – not just an American, but a worldwide phenomenon.

This hysteria is easy to dismiss, but it is important. We began covering it at TechCentralStation because it involved several broad themes that are profoundly affecting American life:

  1. The difficulty of translating science into public policy – which has led, very simply, to the distortion of scientific evidence for political ends. That is, the derogation of sound science. We see this all over, especially in environmental policy. When it comes to obesity, there is a great deal that we do not know, including whether fat children become fat adults and how to separate the particular risk factor of obesity from other factors, where the causal relationship between overweight and illness is, and even how to define overweight and obesity. For example, the ideal weight for a six-foot man according to BMI tables is between 150 and 165 pounds. My own BMI is 24.4, which is just 6/10s of a point short of overweight. The key is this statement by Chou, Grossman and Shaffer in their study last fall for the National Bureau of Economic Research: “Although the prevalence of obesity continues to rise, the reasons for this increase remain unknown and speculative.”
  2. The distressing trend of blaming others for one’s own poor behavior. It appears that, except in a few cases, the main reason that people are fat is that they either eat too much or exercise too little – or some combination. Whose fault is that? In a society in which NOTHING is your own fault, we seek scapegoats. In the case of obesity, the villains are, quite frankly, absurd: restaurants, makers of candy bars, purveyors of soft drinks? Come on. Even more than in the case of smoking, obesity shines a huge spotlight on the importance of personal responsibility.
  3. Unintended consequences. In their NBER study last fall, Chou and colleagues looked at the economic factors behind the rise in obesity. They found, for example, that the success of the anti-smoking campaign seems to have made more people fat. On the subject of exercise, one study found that over the past century, the reduction in jobs requiring physical labor – overall, a good thing – has decreased energy expenditure in the amount of 500 to 600 calories a day, enough to account for the entire weight gain over the period. Computers, TV, music videos have all increased sedentary behavior. “Nothing is as firmly established in the literature as the fact that TV-watching and overweight children go hand in hand,” wrote Mary Eberstadt in Policy Review recently. And more efficient agriculture and management have helped push down the price of food. Finally, government social policies on food, including food stamps and the WIC program, encourage over-consumption. As my AEI colleague Doug Besharov points out, these policies seem geared toward feeding the starving, while starvation is emphatically not the big nutritional problem in America today. On restaurants: They have indeed proliferated, but as the Chou study says, “A literal interpretation
Ambassador Glassman has had a long career in media. He was host of three weekly public-affairs programs, editor-in-chief and co-owner of Roll Call, the congressional newspaper, and publisher of the Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic. For 11 years, he was both an investment and op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.

The views expressed above represent those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the editors and publishers of Capitalism Magazine. Capitalism Magazine sometimes publishes articles we disagree with because we think the article provides information, or a contrasting point of view, that may be of value to our readers.

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