A large problem
by David Atkins
This isn’t good:
In 2030, 42 percent of American adults will be obese, and about one-quarter of that group will be severely obese, a condition that shortens life and incurs large medical expenses, a new study predicts.
This view into the future is less ominous than one published four years ago that predicted that 51 percent of the population would be obese in 2030. Nevertheless, the trend fortells a huge drag on the health and economic welfare of the United States.
“If we don’t do anything, this is going to really hinder any efforts to contain future health-care costs,” Justin G. Trogdon, an economist and one of the authors of the projection, told experts Monday at the start of the two-day “Weight of the Nation” conference in Washington.
However, if obesity stays at its current prevalence — 34 percent of adults — and does not increase, the savings in projected health-care costs will be considerable, about $550 billion, the authors said. The most recent evidence, in fact, suggests that obesity rates are plateauing.
“Regardless which is correct, we still have a very serious problem,” William H. Dietz, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s obesity program, said of the scenarios.
The causes of the obesity epidemic are many: the expense of healthy foods, subsidies for the ingredients that make up unhealthy processed foods, increased stress and sedentary work hours, and more sedentary entertainments all being among them. Dealing with the problem is a huge part of keeping healthcare costs down, which in turn are a huge part of our issues with Medicare and the deficit in general. It’s a public health problem that requires major public health solutions.
So predictably, Republicans are engaging in character assassination of the First Lady for doing even mildly innocuous things to address the issues. In thirty years everyone will realize what “elitist” readers of Michael Pollan and similar authors already know: that food policy is serious public policy, and has to be managed with the same tools we use for every other piece of public policy.
Thirty years from now the idea of a “twinkie tax” will be taken seriously, rather than serve as the butt of a right-wing joke. For now though, the right will do what it always does: delay enlightened policy by years and decades just because they can. Forgiveness is nice, but sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for society if conservatives were publicly shamed at regular intervals, with a full accounting of the wrongheaded and retrograde beliefs they held just 30 years prior. Let the opponents of Loving v. Virginia and the detractors of Martin Luther King Jr. step into the light for all to see. Let those who resisted AIDS research be shamed in the public square. In a couple of decades we could have a public accounting for the Bush supporters and the climate deniers and the homophobes.
And in a few more decades, let the opponents of “twinkie taxes” suffer the same light of intense scrutiny. It’s always fun to mock the “other” today. But maybe it’ll be a lot less fun if people see that they’ll be publicly scorned and mocked a few years down the road.
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