How would YOU solve the obesity crisis?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Okay, I had a much longer version of this post but the bastard server crashed and flushed it down the memory hole so here’s the cliff notes:

I saw a documentary called Fed Up about the childhood obesity crisis. It was fucking terrifying. Here’s how I’d solve it:

  1. Make home economics classes mandatory all the way through high school and change the curriculum so that 50% of the course is about how to cook cheap and healthy meals. Contrary to popular belief, healthy food is not expensive provided you know the right foods to buy, and how to prepare them.

  2. Teach more basic medical science in biology classes. Teach kids about things like insulin resistance, atherosclerosis, and the difference between HDL and LDL cholesterol in biology classes. It’s been a while since I was in high school but I wasn’t taught any of that.

  3. Ban the sale of junk food in schools. Ditch the vending machines and force cafeterias to only provide healthy, nutritionally sensible choices.

  4. Make schools provide kids with the option of a HEALTHY school breakfast, funded by the taxpayer. Something like oatmeal and a piece of fruit. This will allow the poorest, who are disproportionately affected by the obesity crisis, to spend more money on healthy foods for dinner.

  5. Pass a law stating that junk food can only be advertised by overweight celebrities. I’m sick of seeing models advertising Coca-Cola and Pizza Hut. We all know they don’t really eat that shit. If you’re going to sell junk food to susceptible children, have Jonah Hill do it.*

  6. Outright ban junk food advertising during children’s TV shows.

  7. Levy a tax on non-diet sodas. Diet soda isn’t good for people by any means, but it’s better than the full-fat alternative. Since people aren’t going to be giving up soda any time soon, incentivise them to buy the diet stuff.

  8. Ban the use of food stamps on junk food.

  9. Use hard-hitting advertising to warn people about the dangers of junk food. Scaremongering worked great for the anti-smoking movement, there’s no reason it can’t work for the anti-obesity movement as well.

  10. Force companies to label the amount of sugar in their products as a percentage of the recommended daily sugar allowance. Thanks to interference from the Sugar lobby, sugar is the only main food ingredient not labelled this way. Therefore, people tend to drastically underestimate the amount of food they eat.

  11. After physical exercise classes, tell children how many calories they have likely burnt off in terms of junk food calories. Something like: “Well done class, that was a good lesson. You all ran for 30 minutes. Congratulations, you just burnt off half a Mars bar.” People tend to overestimate the number of calories exercise burns. By putting it in context I think it might be easier for people to avoid junk food.

What do you think?

[sub]*Note: This one might be difficult to implement ;)[/sub]

2

Shit-can all gaming systems. Eliminate 496 of the 500 channels on TV.

In other words, “Go the fuck outside and PLAY!”

3

I think all those ideas won’t do squat.
Bans, laws, and taxes won’t stop people. Ever hear of Prohibition?
Education might help a little.
Labeling? Who reads those?
Things at school? Children are only in school about 1,000 or so hours a year. The rest are not in school.

4

What do you think the curriculum is right now? And how will you alter the rest of the high school curriculum to make room for one more mandatory course?

5

De-emphasize the standard classroom model and get the children more active as part of their schooling. Learning should be not just mental, but physical, emotional and social in balance and working together.

Sitting them at a desk all day between 2 bus rides is so anti child.

So in other words treat them as real children as that is what they are and they deserve to be treated. Treated in the real sense of the word ‘treat’.

6

You’re giving them four whole channels? You’ll spoil them rotten! Back in the day, we only had three.

If you want to stop obesity, you could start by taxing proxies for obesity, like unhealthy food. Better yet would be to actually tax obesity directly, by taking progessively more money from people if they were overweight. But since this idea won’t fly with the large population of the American public that is unhealthy, you’ll have to stick to disincentivizing obesity proxies.

You could also solving the root problem, which is the system of social insurance that makes us collectively responsible for everyone else’s health. If that was abolished or reformed such that the moral hazard it creates was removed, you wouldn’t have a very pressing need to “solve” the obesity crisis.

7

I’m English, and we don’t really have Home Economics in schools much here (although we should!), but I found this curriculum for a course here. It talks about things like double entry bookkeeping, restaurant etiquette, different breeds of cat, how to make a PB&J sandwich (seriously!), how to clean your teeth, and a bunch of other stuff of, shall we say, dubious importance.

Out of the 22 modules presented, only 3 focus on healthy eating. Conversely, there’s also a module on organising party buffets and how to make the perfect cupcake. I think the course could be made much more practical and relevant by drastically increasing the amount of emphasis on healthy eating and dropping the less relevant stuff.

The documentary makes it very clear that childhood obesity is exploding, and it’s largely down to two things. The first is the lack of healthy options in schools. A kid could run ten miles a day, but if he’s having pizza and fries for lunch and grabbing chocolate and coke from a vending machine between classes it’s not going to make a blind bit of difference. This is a very simple fact that needs to be drummed into kids from an early age. You can’t outrun a bad diet. If a kid eats a mars bar and washes it down with a can of coke, that’s nearly 500 calories. It takes about 30-45 minutes of fairly intense cardio to burn that off.

The second thing is that children are very susceptible to junk food advertising.

The game plan of these companies is very simple: Get them while they’re young. That’s why targeting measures at schools could well prove effective. Taking the junk food out of school and providing them with mandatory healthy options can only help them. Banning TV advertising to children will make it less likely that they’ll nag their parents to buy them crap food which, in turn, means they’ll be less addicted to it (and I use that word very deliberately) by the time they start school.

As for labelling, lots of people read it. That’s why the sugar lobby strong-armed the government into allowing companies to choose not to show the sugar in their products as a percentage of the RDA. If no-one read labels, they wouldn’t have had to go to that trouble.

As for bans, laws and taxes? Well, I’m only advocating banning three things: junk food in schools, junk food advertising on kids TV, and the right to spend food stamps on junk foods. These aren’t things for which a black market can easily fill the demand. There’s no such thing as black market TV advertising, after all.

Also, taxes have been proven to have an effect on people’s spending habits. Take cigarettes. In England, cigarettes are way more expensive than they are in the US. This is almost entirely due to cigarette taxes. They go up every year, and every year more and more people quit smoking (or at least cut down), because they just can’t afford it anymore. There is a black market for tobacco, but it’s pretty small, largely because people know (thanks to advertising) that they shouldn’t be smoking anyway, and getting black market cigarettes is a hassle. If taxes can induce people to stop buying cigarettes, one of the most addictive products on earth, then it can also encourage people to buy diet soda instead of full-fat soda. Besides, if a bottle of full-fat soda goes up by 50 cents while diet soda stays the same price, it doesn’t really give anyone much incentive to sell black market coca-cola. People will just buy diet instead. It tastes pretty much the same.

8

There’s no such thing as full-fat soda. Non-diet soda has full-sugar, but no fat.

9

Duly noted. Full sugar is what I meant to say.

10

I like all the suggestions, and I would add:
12) Heavily tax the producers of catalysts, and the catalysts themselves, used to hydrogenate fats. Yes, the calories are the same. Maybe the damage would lessen.
13) Tax all the producers of enzymes (and producers of) used in manufacturing HFCS. Make the tax high enough that the cost is passed on to consumers.
14) Use the tax monies, plus those of the OP’s suggestions, toward installing sidewalks in areas which lack them, starting with the most heavily populated areas first.
15) Heavily tax the antibiotics used as growth promoters in livestock, along with any other feed supplements designed to fatten livestock.
16) Remove sales taxes from gym memberships and athletic wear; allow income tax deductions for the costs of above.
17) Remove any subsidies for grain farmers.

11

That’s going to be a difficult one when Coke and Pepsi are giving money to schools in order to sell their crap there.

I agree with kanicbird in that physical activity has been highly de-emphasized at the schools. I think many of the sports my kids have played as part of their PE classes have been watered-down so that everyone can participate. While not a bad idea in and of itself, no one is really challeneged any more. Altho, at middle school, the kids are given a 1-mile running “test”, but one can easily get out of that for a variety of reasons, and it does not count for much on their final grade.

I am fortunate in that we have the means to allow our kids to participate in after-school sports, but that is very optional for most people, I realize. I think certain things are getting missed in the drive to ensure kids test well and do good on SATs and get into colleges - sports and music programs are often given short shrift, but I think they are equally as important as academics, IMHO.

12

I dunno, would it be possible to carbonate an unsaturated fat like vegetable oil? It doesn’t look like anyone has tried it, but it might be possible. (Obviously, it’d probably be sickening)

13

It’s all going to come down to the wallet. Food and drinks will be taxed according to nutritional value vs empty calories or calories in excess of an RDA. Some nutritionists smarter than me can work out the tables on that.

You can still get your triple bypass cheeseburger, it’s just going to cost you 20 bucks. 10 more for fries and 15 for the carbonated sugar syrup drink. Healthy portions of healthy foods will be reasonably priced.

Subsidies for producers of HFCS will go away. That cost can run straight through to the consumer. I foresee a substantial reduction in corn syrup sweeteners in foods when added to make them more attractive to consumer palates.

The junk food industry will have to reinvent itself in view of the empty calorie tax. Five dollar twinkies won’t be a viable business model for long.

14

I think looking to schools and government is ridiculous as a way to solve this problem. That said, I do think home economics classes are a great idea - not as a way to fight obesity, just as a way to make sure that all kids know basic life skills.

One problem can be illustrated by Washington state’s short-lived “candy tax.” The law was designed to tax junk food exactly the way the OP describes. However, trying to legally define junk food is harder than it sounds. For example, the law exempted items containing flour, so that baked goods were not junk food - including doughnuts, cookies and licorice! Meanwhile, gluten-free protein/fiber bars? Yep, subject to the candy tax. Plus, the administrative overhead. Grocery stores had to literally go through the law and the ingredient list of every item on their shelves to determine what was taxed and what wasn’t, and they would have to continually re-review their lists for any changes in ingredients. (And how about all those “may contain” provisions on labels?)

Could the law have been better written? I’m thinking probably not. I suspect that “junk food” is like “pornography” - while you may know it when you see it, trying to describe it in legal text is impossible. Defining “non-diet soda” is the same thing… especially true when most fruit juices are just as bad for you as soda is.

Furthermore, I don’t think the taxes will change consumption in a meaningful way. We already have surtaxes on alcohol and cigarettes that have pretty minimal effects on alcoholism and smoking.

If it was up to me, I think the best the government can do is make sure that there are markets for devices to help parents regulate child activity levels. Something like the V chip, that lets parents create a budget between exercise and TV/video game consumption.

15

Why do you need bans to create conditions parents can easily create for themselves?

16

When I was a kid, we rarely age junk food. My mother was a great cook, who rarely made anything with huge quantities of fats and sugars. We played outside, and only had 3 TV channels.

I’m still fat.

17

When you see a fattie:
[ul]
[li]Tell them they are disgusting.[/li][li]Poke them in the belly.[/li][li]Ask them what they do beside eat everything.[/li][li]Grab their arm to show them how flabby it is.[/li][li]Tell them they disgust you.[/li][li]Yell at them from across the street.[/li][li]Tell them to take a dance class.[/li][li]Tell them you care about them and only want to help.[/li][li]Tell them they should be ashamed of themselves. [/li][li]Be rude to them.[/li][/ul]

I’m sure that I forgotten some…

…or just kill them and be done with it.

Foggy who’s BMI is 53, the same as my age.

18

Excuse me? Non sequitur. Somebody with insulin resistance would be set up for a day of blood sugar spikes and dips by a breakfast like that. Where’s the protein? It’s all carbs.

19

All the ideas are reasonable. Lot’s of luck getting them past Big Food and their lobbies and Super-Pacs.

20

Oatmeal is a complex carb which also has a generous helping of cholesterol lowering soluble fibre. That means it releases energy into the bloodstream slowly, ergo no insulin spike. A generous helping of oatmeal also contains about 8g of protein, not including the milk. As for the fruit, it does have simple sugars, but it also has fibre which again militates against insulin spikes. Apple is particularly good because the skin contains a chemical called pectin which, like the oatmeal, is a soluble fibre that helps lower cholesterol. Also, chopping the apple up and mixing it into the oatmeal naturally sweetens the dish without the need for added sugar. I have oatmeal for breakfast every day and ever since I started I almost never get mid-morning hunger pangs. Oatmeal is recommended as a breakfast food by the American Cardiology Association for these very reasons. Oatmeal is also nutritionally dense, being rich in B vitamins, magnesium, and folic acid.

It should go without saying that when I say oatmeal, I’m talking about natural whole rolled oats, not the processed crap that’s laden with sugar. It also has the benefit of being very cheap.