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FAT SCARE LEADS TO GOVERNMENT GIRTH
Radley Balko
Last week, under a mandate from Congress, the Institute of Medicine (search) initiated a report to battle childhood obesity (search) in America. The report was sweeping in scope, calling on government at all levels to muster resources, and to take decisive action. It called for massive federal intervention in public education, federal nutrition requirements in school lunches, heavy regulation of soda and snack machines, and for Federal Trade Commission authority over the marketing of food to children. The report also called on local governments to change zoning laws to favor pedestrians and bicyclists over automobiles. "We're talking about something that's nothing less than a revolution," Dr. Thomas Robinson, one of the authors, told the Boston Globe. "It has to involve so many elements in our society. ... It's really going to require a major sea change in how we look at this problem." That’s the kind of language government usually invokes in times of war, not in response to a hard-to-define condition with ambiguous consequences brought on by voluntary behavior. Indeed, Surgeon General Richard Carmona (search) recently said that our expanding waistlines were “every bit as threatening as the terrorist threat.” |
