BARBS

It isn’t often that I find myself in agreement with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. But today (actually,I’m talking about yesterday’s paper but I’m only getting to it today), I do.

In an editorial titled, “The Fat of the Land,” the Journal takes the government to task for its role in stoking America’s obesity epidemic, an epidemic that has become an increasingly large part of the nation’s health care spending — which the Obama administration is trying to tamp down.

The editors point out:

• 72 million Americans — that’s one out of every three — are obese.
• Obesity is associated with diabetes, heart disease, some cancers and other chronic illnesses.
• In this week’s “Weight of the Nation” report, the Centers for Disease Control estimates that obesity now accounts for 9.1% of all medical spending — $147 billion in 2008.
• The CDC also estimates that the annual per capita increase in Medicare spending attributable to obesity is 36%; for Medicaid, it’s 47%.

In short, Americans (this one included) eat too much.

Now, I don’t agree with everything in this editorial. But I do agree with this:

Congress should give up its own bad habits right now. Start by reforming agricultural “policy,” meaning subsidies that help make unhealthy food artificially cheap. Most of the new calories in the American diet come from processed foods, and taxpayers have underwritten them since the New Deal with huge price supports for commodity crops like corn and soy. These are processed into low-quality calories that make their way to consumers as refined starches, high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils and feed for livestock.

Thus, as a letter writer to the Journal says on the same page, “it now costs less to buy a corn-fed burger loaded with salt, flavor enhancers and other unhealthy additives than it does to buy an apple or peach.”

Before you “personal responsibility” advocates jump all over me and say that people should just bypass the tortilla chips and say “no thanks” to cookies and cake, let me say that, on the one hand, I agree. On the other hand, the playing field for the individual American eater and the gigantic American food industry is not exactly level. It’s hard to just say no when Big Food constantly bombards us with cues to buy what David Kessler, in his new book, The End of Overeating, calls highly addictive “hyperpalatable” foods:

In a cyclical process, eating highly palatable food activates the opioid circuits, and activating these circuits increases consumption of highly palatable food.

In other words, Kessler argues, the consumption of hyperpalatable foods — many of them subsidized by the government — turns many of us into the equivalent of crackheads always vulnerable to the next fix.

If the President and health reform advocates want to keep costs down — and they say they do — why not start by taking the corn growers’ crack — government subsidies — away? I’m not saying I won’t binge on another bag of chips; but I’d have to spend more of my hard-earned money to do it, so maybe, just maybe, I would decide not to do it. And maybe, just maybe, people with far less expendable income than I have, and for whom the cheap cost of fattening hyperpalatable foods puts them at high risk of obesity, might decide to buy something else instead.

Hey, it’s a start.