The war on fat: is the size of your butt the government's business?

Reason, August-Sept, 2004 by Jacob Sullum

Disease Control

Both Nestle and Brownell dismiss defenses of individual choice and responsibility as the self-serving rationalizations of profit-hungry corporations. But while anti-fat activists treat "freedom" as an empty corporate slogan, they seem to think the mantra of "public health" can justify any policy proposal. The phrase allows them to smuggle in the assumption that government action is appropriate without having to offer an argument. Like the habit of calling rising BMI trends art "epidemic," this rhetorical trick obscures the fact that obesity is not a contagious disease; it does not spread from person to person in a way that justifies state action.

Brownell does not acknowledge a distinction between voluntarily assumed risks and risks imposed on others. He wants us to think of efforts to "clean up" the "toxic food environment" as equivalent to restrictions on air and water pollution. "Prudent public health practice structures the environment so citizens have lowered exposure to hazards," Brownell and Horgen explain. They seem oblivious to the totalitarian implications of such a broadly understood "public health" agenda, which makes even the most personal choices subject to group control. "Before progress can be made on changing the American diet," they write, "there must be collective agreement that the population should be eating more of some foods and less of others." They call their goal a "Braver New World," apparently without recognizing the chilling connotations of that phrase. And although Brownell has said "a militant attitude is warranted" when it comes to food, he describes his policy proposals as "centrist."

In some respects, Brownell does not seem to have the courage of his collectivist convictions. When I facetiously suggested at the AEI conference that, rather than tax certain foods (which might be eaten by the thin as well as the fat), the government should tax people for each pound over their ideal weight, he objected. Brownell's complaint was not that such a system would be tyrannical because how much you weigh is your business, not the government's. Plainly, he doesn't believe that. Instead, he worried that a weight tax puts too much emphasis on individual responsibility rather than the environment. But if the prices people pay for food are part of the environment that encourages obesity, so is the price they pay for being fat.

Speaking of which, Brownell condemns "anti-fat media messages" and the social stigma attached to obesity, saying people should not be blamed for their failure to resist the forces that make it is so difficult to stay thin. But from a "public health" standpoint, fairness is not the issue. The only question is whether making fat people miserable encourages them to lose weight. Brownell suggests it doesn't, but why would such pervasive social pressures be less effective than a tax on Doritos?

Similarly, last year John Banzhaf told the Obesity Policy Report, "I don't think the government can order [people] to exercise." Why not? Which is more likely to make Americans thinner: suing McDonald's, or mandatory calisthenics in the public square every morning? If you assume that slimming us down is a proper goal of government, it's hard to see the objection to policies that show promise of actually working, as opposed to enriching lawyers or making a statement.