How would you solve the obesity epidemic?

In My Humble Opinion
1

We all know the stats - we’re all getting fatter and at younger ages, blah blah blah. There are lots of methods proposed in dealing with this from the invasive (gastric bypass/band), to the medical (drugs that make you bypass fat) to the truly radical (diet, exercise and moderation in living - :eek: ).

Say you’re made the health minister for whatever country you live in with responsibility for eradicating obesity and getting the weight of your country down to a decent level, how do you do it? Carrot or stick? And how do you balance the duty of the state to help its citizens against the right of people to eat themselves to death if they want to?

2

Soylent Green.

3

I’d favour a “Carrot” approach, with things like making gym & sports club memberships (along with fitness and/or sports equipment) 100% tax-deductible.

I’d also encourage the use of a sort of “Standard Drinks”-type measurement for foods; rather than a bunch of complicated numbers about Calories and Kilojoules and Sodium and Fats and Sugars and Percentage of Daily Intake, I’d set it up so that fast-food and takeaway restaurants would prominently display “This meal represents 2.2 Meal Units”, with the Recommended Meal Units for a person being something like (say) 5 per day. Obviously the system would need more thought and planning put into it, but you get the idea.

Thirdly, I’d make it a legal requirement that filtered water be available free of charge to customers- and the availability must be prominently displayed, not hidden in tiny print at the bottom of the “drinks” menu.

Finally, the withdrawal of Government funding from sporting events that are profitable on their own and the diversion of those funds to encourage actual participation in sports or physical activity across the community, with a focus on “lower profile” sports that don’t get as much attention as things like Rugby or Cricket- eg providing funds for fencing clubs to purchase equipment, community swimming pools to upgrade facilities, and so on.

4

Personally, I’d start by fixing Phys Ed programs in public schools. Phys Ed teachers should treat sports as one possible means to an end, not a goal in and of themselves. The goal should be to ensure that the students will want to continue to exercise of their own free will, once you’re not on their back about it.

5

This is one area where I think China actually does a pretty good job. Some things we could learn:

[ol]
[li]Install fitness parks with simple outdoor fitness equiptment in every houseing development and public space. Every single apartment complex and park in China has a small outdoor gym, which are especially popular with the elderly.[/li][li]Provide incentives for small fruit stands convient to people’s houses, jobs, schools, etc. Make buying fruit easier than buying junk food.[/li][li]Encourage both children and adults to do two different active things a day. Hope that some of these stick as life-long habits. [/li][li]Prepare school lunches from fresh, wholesome ingredients heavily focused on veggies. Do not provide other options. Kids eat real food or nothing. [/li][li]Learn to drink water.[/li][/ol]

In addition, I would build more walkable communities and encourage people (especially kids) to get outside more often. I think what is making us balloon up is not so much that we don’t go to the gym, as much as we’ve lost a lot of the low-level but steady movement we used to do…which I think is why cities tend to be quite a bit leaner than suburbs.

6

Tax unhealthy foods, and use the money raised to subsidise healthy food.

7

Oooo…tough one that. Carrots are very healthy and environmentally efficient to grow. But they do contain sugar. :eek:

Sticks on the other hand are principally cellulose. Tough to digest, very little sugar, provided you keep away from the maple variety…
Sooo…I’m legislating for compulsory stick lunches as an introductory step. Indeed, the McStick burger has a certain je n’est pas don’t you think??

8

Calories posted on menus has helped me make more informed decisions and I bet it helps restaurants to come up with lower calorie options so they can present a healthier image. I vote for more of this.

Poor urban areas need better access to inexpensive fresh fruits and veggies. Maybe like an ice cream truck that drives around the neighborhood? Even if there is a decent grocery store five blocks away a woman with a baby in one arm is not going to carry a bag of apples and a bag of potatoes all the way home. If it’s available right outside her apartment complex, maybe she will.

9

I’m assuming I have carte blanche?

Begin by defining guidelines for how we allow zoning for restaurants. For example, in a small suburb here in FL you might find two or more clusters of the same fast food joints simply placed for geographic convenience. I would start be defining the minimum amount of acceptable area allowed between multiple locations of the same chain. From now on, there will be only one company license granted per “City Unit”. No more burger king on every corner, and Starbucks every other block. Starting definitions might be: Urban unit- 5 square miles, suburban unit 20 square miles, rural unit- defined by township, but no more than one per 20 square miles. Further, No more than two “type” licenses shall be granted within the same unit. Type is defined by business model and food served. So for example, burger king would fall under “Chain, fast food, burgers.” Other guys in the same type would be McDonalds, Sonic, Checkers, and so forth. In a unit you could have for example a BK and one other vendor of the same type. No more “Burger row” where you have four competing chains serving the same food. Sit down restaurants that offer a meal plan/ menu that is well balanced nutritionally will be given preference.

School menus will now be required to be produced from fresh materials at all times, and must offer a balanced menu. Children below the high school age will not be given choices in the menu beyond general feedback, and choice of beverage. Unsweetened milk, unsweetened juices, water, and a balanced “sports drink” will be offered. Soda, coffee, tea, and junk snack food machines are prohibited in all elementary and middle schools. High Schools may offer a choice in menu between entree’, vegetarian entree’, and self serve salad bar. Beverages will be expanded to offer tea and soda at lunch only. Machines are available to dispense juices and balanced sports beverages.

Create Community Fitness Centers to serve everyone within a given area. Provided you live in the serviced range these centers have a very low cost of pass. Offer week, month, tri month, six month, and yearly passes. These will be linked to parks and offer a wide variety of simple, low cost equipment and fitness options.

Add a significant healthy citizen tax break to the code. Citizens that meet general fitness and weight guidelines can apply for this refund per person in the household meeting the guidelines. Citizens can get their certification at any community fitness center, or at certain certified locations at no cost. Note that this is entirely on the part of the citizen to procure. The *default *tax rate remains the same regardless of fitness level if you do not have a cert to attach to your return. A healthy citizen qualifies as being: Less than obese, but no less than underweight as defined by either BMI, or a doctor’s certification. So for example, a powersports athlete may be overweight, or obese due to muscle mass, but may gain their cert through a doctor or other qualified tech. Likewise someone who is very tall and thin naturally might also gain their cert through their doctor who can use other methods to determine fitness.

Impose a tax on junk foods similar to ones levied on alcohol and tobacco. Provide tax breaks for snack vendors (like fueling stations) who offer a higher percentage of healthy options to junk snacks.

10

Being a libertarian, I would never want to limit food choices. But if I were a dictator and did want to solve the obesity epidemic, I would simply make high-calorie food much more expensive and/or much less available.

11

Imprison any citizen whose weight is more than 10% above accepted normal for their weight. Either that, or I’d keep the government out of peoples way and allow them to deal with it.

12

Design communities so they’re walkable / bikeable. Put in some damn sidewalks where they don’t exist already.

Also, feed kids some decent food in school lunches so they develop a taste for it.

13

Compulsory cooking courses in middle and high school.

Health classes teaching calories and balanced nutrition. Like WeightWatchers or something.

No candy fundraisers!

Fines for restaurants who do not publish caloric information.

More regulation on food labelling, especially standardising what constitutes a portion, so people know instantly what’s in it. No more: one serving of cola is 120 calories, when a bottle is 2.5 servings. A bottle or a bag of crisps is one serving and the labelling should reflect that. If a food is high fat or calorie, put a red ribbon of colour around the label.

City planning - stop zoning to where you can’t physically walk or cycle to work. Create spaces for attractive living. Encourage bike ownership with subsidies.

14

This. Tax incentives, credits etc. are all good, but they alone will not do it. We need to get back to rational community designs. Make walking pleasureable again and not something to be avoided. Build mixed use comminities again so people can walk to the store, work and home and not have to drive everywhere.

Make parking less convenient by having less and keeping it behind businesses and move buildings closer to the street and provide windows that give pedestrians something interesting to see.

If each day, people got out and walked 15 minutes to where they need to go, whether it is work or to catch a bus/train, or the store, that would go a long way to helping fix the problem.

15

I would make fitness/nutrition information a required unit of gym and health classes. That’s it.

It’s none of anyone’s business what anyone else weighs. I refuse to spend resources on something that is not effecting anyone else, and I don’t see how a government should have any right to meddle in what people do with their bodies.

Seriously, we have far more important things to worry about right now. Health problems from obesity are far less important than health problems from getting shot in the chest in any American inner city.

16

If I may hijack for one moment, this is not what this phrase means. The carrot & stick metaphor does not mean choosing between a reward and punishment. The carrot is a reward dangled on a stick in front of a donkey to make him continue forward. The reward is always just out of reach.

17

The start would be getting rid of corn subsidies.

18

Sorry, but that’s completely untrue. Walking 15 minutes a day will do virtually nothing in terms of preventing obesity. In an absolute ideal world, you could possibly lose or not gain close to ten pounds over the course of a year. Realistically, you might start to feel better in general if that is your only exercise, but it would probably have virtually no impact on overall weight or weight gain.

Also not true at all. People always overestimate the risk of dramatic “scary” things like gunshots, and underestimate the risk of what is actually responsible for killing someone. Inner city folks tend to be poor and tend to have the highest rate of weight related morbidity and mortality. For example, in DC, the homicide rate is about 24/ 100,000 (.00024%). On the other hand, over 35% of children in DC are considered overweight or obese.

19

Obesity kills a lot more people in the US than murders do.

20

I used to live in a suburb where a produce vendor would drive around the neighborhood once a week, and we’d buy fruits and veggies from him when my mom couldn’t get to the supermarket. We lived in a neighborhood that had several liquor stores within walking distance, and one Korean-run grocery store on the corner with a limited selection, and the nearest supermarket with a real produce section was a few miles away. We would drive there on weekends, but sometimes stuff would run out on weekdays, so we’d have to find it at the corner store or do without. I remember my sister, when we were kids, saying something about how there should be a truck like an ice cream truck driving around selling things like bread and milk and that kind of stuff. I think she was tired of being sent to the corner market yet again.