Several interesting posts about obesity. Megan doubts that there is any government policy could make Americans thinner. She refers to a new blogger, Sarah, who talks about how she was treated before she lost 100 pounds. Feministe writes about a shameful PETA campaign, which makes fun of fat women.
I appreciate these stories by the formerly and presently overweight. Treat everyone with kindness, people!
But I think that we can create conditions that help those who want to lose weight. I disagree with Megan. We can make people thinner, not by penalizing the bad behavior, but by reducing the costs for the good behavior. Some ideas: We could subside healthy fastfood restaurants in poorer neighborhoods. We could provide food vouchers for vegetables. Return cooking classes to high schools.
Apt. 11d 
I wonder if the best way to stop obesity would be to not target food but to target the parts of our lives that make us choose to eat poorly.
My boss began working from home 2 years ago and quickly lost 40 pounds. He will go for quick 30 minute jogs and graba 5 minute shower once or twice per day between conference calls and he can fix himself a healthy lunch that didn’t come from a Lean Cuisine box.
Most of our unhealthty eating habits come from our fast-paced lives. More telecommuting and more time at home may be the best answer.
LikeLike
Kids TV producers seem to have gotten the memo. Dora and Diego keep trying to make me get up and jump. And don’t get me started on Lazytown.
LikeLike
I’m a small-government type, but there are things government could do, which would help.
First: list calorie counts on menus. Set ceilings on the maximum portion calorie count (or size) for fast food. 8 ounces for sodas, for example, and x calories for french fries, etc. Allow people to order more than one at a time, but do away with “supersizing.” Also, do not allow restaurants to give effective discounts for larger portions.
Also, set a maximum size for packaged snack foods, such as potato chips, and sodas. Do away with the common practice of placing junk food at store entrances, and no special offers on junk food.
Taxing junk food is a very bad idea. The food is so appealing, families on a tight budget will cut healthy food, to buy junk food.
I remember what teenagers used to look like.
LikeLike
Wow, I can’t imagine how “small government-type” and “set maximum size for packaged snack foods” can be compatible in any way.
I’m a big fan of calorie counts, though, especially at restaurants. We recently went to one that was required to have calorie counts, and gave the to us, with the menus. We were able to choose a much healthier meal, and wouldn’t have been able to without the info, because you can’t know what the portion sizes or preparation methods are from the menu. It turned out the fish was really high calorie, because the fish was deep fried and encrusted. The sausage and beans, on the other hand, was pretty OK, mostly because the portion size wasn’t enormous, and there were vegetables.
I don’t’ think we can make people thinner by trying to force restaurants out of business, and that’s what I think micromanaging their portion sizes would do.
I also think the vouchers for specific foods has consistently been a failure.
I do think that we could 1) return cooking classes to schools. That would be useful. 2) offer healthier school lunches & breakfasts. 3) provide more and better opportunities for physical activity to children (after school programs/community centers, etc.).
LikeLike
Government policy made us fat, so I can’t see an issue with it making us thin again.
We subsidize meat production and corn, so those are the cheapest things to eat. Switch those subsidies to healthy fast food, and the production of organic fruit and vegetables instead.
Calorie counts on menus would help too.
LikeLike
Locally, relax development standards to allow for walkable neighborhoods at different scales. Nationally, provide incentives to do the same.
LikeLike
Health Insurance should cover at least a portion of the cost for Weight Watchers and other weight loss programs. They should completely subsidize gym membership and maybe even completely pay for those pre-packaged portion control food plans for really overweight people.
It’s really stupid, they’ll pay for the new knees, bypass etc — but not for the means to lose weight.
LikeLike
“They should completely subsidize gym membership”
I bet that would only get you the crappy gym like Bally’s.
LikeLike
Did you see the article in the NYTimes magazine about taxing the overweight? I’d say the argument made sense… to a point. If we tax people with high BMIs (and we’d get all the muscle-bound people that way), I’d want to demand a tax on people who are too underweight. Not like they’re bastions of health, either.
I honestly don’t know how to lose weight; let alone the number of factors; let alone how I did it. I dropped 30 lbs in a year, and the only thing different that I’m aware of was an injury to my spinal cord. Sure, the pain did kill my appetite, but was that all?
(But if I could market that plan, oh the money I could roll in….)
LikeLike
I wore braces for 3 years and lost 50 lbs. Not kidding. My mouth hurt all the time. I could rarely chew. Not willing to do that again, and doubt I could market it.
LikeLike
Doug K,
I was just looking at the Ezra Klein post with the two pyramids (showing subsidies versus distribution on the food pyramid) that you linked. I only looked at the first dozen or two comments, but there was some very interesting stuff there (more so than in the post itself). I thought it was very naughty of the creator of the pyramids to combine meat and dairy in a single category, since they are treated very differently subsidy-wise. Dairy is famously subsidized and has all sorts of weird Byzantine rules. I don’t know about poultry and pork, but as a (small-time) cattle rancher’s daughter, I can tell you that there is definitely no direct beef subsidy.
I suspect that subsidies are much more difficult to analyze than that Ezra Klein post suggests, since direct subsidies are only one piece of the picture. As the commentors point out, US fruit and vegetable production already benefit from cheap water rates and lax immigration enforcement. I also think that in this age of globalized food, focusing on the internal US situation is inadequate.
Personally, I don’t know what to make of the food hysteria. I grew up in the era of nutritionally worthless canned green beans and horrible Red “Delicious” apples, and even doing my grocery shopping at a low-income/student HEB I’m still pinching myself at how wonderful it is to be able to buy pre-cut frozen stir fry veggies or frozen raspberries.
LikeLike
Speaking of veggies, I just ordered a sprout kit and a bunch of samples of sprouting seeds via Amazon. It’s going to be fun.
LikeLike
There is nothing we can do which will cause anyone, especially not large numbers of people, to loose weight and keep it off. Sustained weight loss is extremely difficult, nearly impossible actually, for even the most motivated individuals. No government policy is going to change that. Our bodies are not programed to loose weight easily. I say that as someone who hasn’t set foot in a fast food restaurant for 20 years and wouldn’t dream of scarfing down a bag of chips or a pint of ice cream…yet has struggled with my weight my entire adult life. The idea that weight loss is a realistic goal is a fantasy.
I think it’s too late for the adults in America. We need to focus on the next generations. Forget about weight loss or encouraging it. The only way to fight fat is to never get fat in the first place. So we need to bring recess and gym back in a big, big way. We need to incentivize fitness for kids and teach them how to do it differently than their parents. Exercise is pretty useless for causing weight loss but it does prevent weight gain so that’s the place to start. (And it’s great for increasing fitness even without weight loss…I’m still overweight but since I started running regularly all of my minor health problems have disappeared and I’m no longer pre-diabetic and gave perfect cholesterol levels–haven’t lost any significant weight though).
We have to convince the parents to want better for their kids and to feed their kids better than they feed themselves. We need to make streets safe for bicycles again and build sidewalks in new neighborhoods and give kids a place worth biking and walking to. Sort of like Jeffery Canada’s idea for breaking the cycle of poverty. Go big and focus on the babies!
LikeLike
auburn,
I think it is important to encourage people to exercise just for health and to be realistic about what exercise can actually do for you and realistic about the distinction between health and aesthetics. I’m a big girl, but I walk regularly, and when I can, I do 3 or 4 miles on the treadmill going along at 3 or 3.5 MPH. I went to the doctor and did a blood test last week. My blood pressure is good, heart rate is good, sugars are good, cholesterol is good. I’m mystified, actually. I haven’t given up on weight loss, but in the meantime just not getting bigger is an achievement. And that’s where talk of shaming fat people is counterproductive–the odds are that they are just going to drown their sorrows in the usual way.
My most dramatic weight gains were (predictably) graduate school/early marriage and child bearing/toddler raising. In graduate school, the combination of stress, sleeplessness, and veal calf conditions (they have cubicles, too) was deadly. I ate just to stay awake and work–voila, 35 pounds. During pregnancy and breastfeeding, I was ragingly hungry all the time and would eat almost anything slower than myself, and then with toddlers I was eating to stay awake and on my feet. Voila–40 pounds.
I have had some weight loss over the past year and a half (largely thanks to Jane Austen), but just achieving stability is a big deal. At least for me, the best way to fight off munchies is sleep and exercise. On a day when I both nap and get to exercise, I don’t get hungry and I feel like Superwoman.
LikeLike
Laura —
“Return cooking classes to high schools.”
Yes! I could have used cooking classes. When I was growing up, my (Italian-American) mother did all the cooking. Though she’s a good cook, her severe territoriality in the kitchen deterred me from hanging out long enough to gain any useful information.
Amy P —
“That’s where talk of shaming fat people is counterproductive–the odds are that they are just going to drown their sorrows in the usual way.”
This.
“I’m a big girl, but I walk regularly, and when I can, I do 3 or 4 miles on the treadmill going along at 3 or 3.5 MPH. I went to the doctor and did a blood test last week. My blood pressure is good, heart rate is good, sugars are good, cholesterol is good.”
This too. It jibes with my experience. I was a big girl and am now a smaller girl, but my blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol have never been a problem. (Knock wood.)
Why? One factor, I think, is that for 16 of the past 21 years, I’ve lived within walking distance of my workplace and have been able to do a lot of errands on foot as well, such as mailing packages, taking the cats to the vet, and returning books to the library.
It took me until my senior year of college, when I signed up for a modern dance class, to make exercise a part of my life. This was unfortunate, and it had a lot to do with the approach of my junior high/high school phys ed classes (late ’70s/early ’80s). They emphasized team sports that required a great deal of hand-eye coordination. So when I kept being picked last for the P.E. class volleyball team or basketball team or soccer team, I learned to associate physical activity with humiliation. Not a good lesson.
LikeLike
It isn’t clear what is causing the obesity epidemic. This cuts down on the effective ways for the government to deal with it. In particular, people seem to lose weight most effectively on diets with a lot of animal fat. Promoting such diets is far from public health policy though.
LikeLike
There’s no substantive evidence that Weight Watchers or Gym memberships cause drops in obesity (of course, people who regularly go to the gym are less obese, but that’s more likely correlation than causation).
The best thing the government can do, to start, is to at least stop doing things that make us fat — specifically subsidizing the corn that goes into all that high fructose corn syrup.
LikeLike
Not to mention the fact that gym membership does not equal gym attendance. Years ago, my husband and I joined our local JCC to go swim at the pool. By my calculation, each swim wound up costing at least $50.
LikeLike
I’m trying to get people to call the JCC the YMJA, but so far with no luck.
LikeLike
I’ve recently lost about 20 pounds and have been astounded how differently people have been treating me. I was slightly overweight before and never felt any animosity, etc., but now that I’m “skinny”, people are actually much warmer toward me. Even some of my scholarly colleagues are treating me more warmly (generally these are male).
But I’ve been interested in the whole weight loss deal and have been reading articles in the NYT and other places as they emerge.
Before thinking public policy, we need to get the science facts correct.
-It is a misconception that skinny people are necessarily healthier than slightly overweight ones. The NYT last year noted a study that people with a BMI just above normal are healthier (better cardio-vascular, better blood pressure, etc.) than those with a “normal” BMI. (My Wii tells me that a BMI of 22 is the “ideal” BMI for being healthy. Clearly its manufacturers do not keep up with the NYT Science Times.)
-It is a misconception that exercise helps one lose weight. TIME did a big thing on this just last month. I’m aware that TIME is not a scholarly journal. But the article cited some interesting scientific studies. People who exercise more eat more than those that don’t. They are also more likely to spend the rest of the day seated, not go for a walk, etc. Exercise is good for making your body look more toned, but not for weight loss unless one is willing to expend an hour a day for vigorous exercise without compensating with food.
– I lost my weight with WW and it’s amazing how that program works — albeit as a marketing mechanism to sell special WW products and food measuring devices designed to use the “points” method.
–My experience of how to do it (anecdotal, not based on science, so don’t build public policy on it): Lower calorie intake and increase fiber. Period. High levels of fiber speeds digestion, though, which means you get fewer nutrients. Raw veggies are better because less of their calories get digested.
I think that the key is to make sure there are grocery stores with healthy food near all communities, particularly in impoverished urban areas. I think subsidies to vegetable farmers/producers might also be useful in some way. Currently, vegetables are quite expensive. Home ec in schools with a curriculum towards nutrition and cooking quick meals with fresh vegetables also might be useful. (Perhaps use lots of fractions of teaspoons and sell it as a math class to get the time from NCLB… just kidding.)
LikeLike
20 pounds is huge, Julie. Congratulations.
I have to read more about the exercise studies. I gained seven pounds when we moved to the suburbs. That’s not huge, I know, but before that, I had stayed the same weight for twenty years. I ate the same food when we moved here, but I no longer walked every where. When I was in the city, I walked at least three miles a day.
LikeLike
see but I think that walking everywhere like you do in NYC is not what I would even count as “exercise” or “working out”, that is general activity level. which might even make more of a difference both because it doesn’t make you hungrier, or to feel permission to overeat, and because people tend to greatly overestimate how much and how hard they “work out”. And it goes along with the idea that activity exercise keeps you from gaining weight…but it doesn’t necessarily make you lose weight.
I also gained weight when I moved from NYC to LA. And strangely…it was around the same time my general level of activity dropped drastically due to career change and moving to a less active city, and I started working out 3 times a week which clearly wasn’t enough to make up for the calories I was burning in a more active job in a more active city. That’s why I think communities with sidewalks and interesting places worth walking or biking to are far more valuable than guy memberships which collect dust. If we all kept up the general activity level of your average Manhattanite we’d be thinner and healthier. We need to move toward more walkable / bikable communities for our children and grandchildren to live in.
LikeLike
sorry, that was “gym memberships” although “guy memberships” might have similar effect and be far less likely to collect dust.
LikeLike
“That’s why I think communities with sidewalks and interesting places worth walking or biking to are far more valuable than guy memberships which collect dust.” Absolutely. Being active keeps you skinny, while the tread mill does little. That’s why I’m going to spend the next two hours in the town pool with the kids. Even if it makes my hair a frizzy mess.
LikeLike
I suppose I should thank my employer for making sure that my parking is so distant that I have to walk for at least 20 minutes a day.
LikeLike