Jake Young is a 
"It will take a grassroots effort of doctors, community leaders and consumers to force the government and the food industry to get those sugary foods out of mainstream American diets" [Robert] Lustig [of UCSF] told the San Francisco Chronicle. "Everyone's assuming you have a choice, but when your brain is starving, you don't have a choice.... Congress says you can't sue McDonald's for obesity because it's your fault. Except the thing is, when you don't have a choice, it's not your fault."...
...forget "starving brains" and the notion that we have "no choice" in the ultimate destiny of our waistlines. If there's anything to blame for our increasing heft, it's the dizzying array of choices that tempt us in every McDonald's and in every Whole Foods Market. Some of the choices available to us are good for our health, some are bad, and every day plenty of people somehow escape the tyranny of their insulin-duped noggins and choose the former.
The debate continues, and I continue to fall on the side of the advocates of choice. I used to be fat, and now I am not. What allowed me to change you ask? A lot of running and good choices -- not Robert Lustig.
Furthermore, shame of Lustig for making this argument from San Francisco. I have lived there. You can't throw a rock and not hit some granola-hawking health food hut.
Comments
The choice problem may not be not an issue in most urban and suburban middle to upper class neighborhoods. In poorer areas food choices are much more restricted and likely to be high-fat, low-fiber and low-micronutrient.
Posted by: natural cynic | January 12, 2007 2:45 PM
As always with the choice crusaders, they forget that the poor do not have the ability to make the same choices. Obesity tracks with poverty, and when all you can afford is crap food, or you lack the education to make better health choices, there is a valid argument for regulation.
Basically the libertarian "choice" arguments always go to crap in the real world because again and again, in the real world choices aren't equal between all people. These arguments always seem to be giving cover to corporate actors behaving irresponsibly at the cost of the poor and uneducated (who deserve healthy food too).
Posted by: quitter | January 13, 2007 10:29 AM
quitter,
Bullshit. They make the same pleasure vs fitness tradeoff the rest of us do. The education aspect is a total crock - the relative healthiness of most foods, especially at a level necessary to avoid obesity, is common knowledge. Believe it or not, poor people can think for themselves and can and do conciously make choices that increase short term pleasure at the expense of long term health with full knowledge of the consequences. I don't understand why public health scolds seem incapable of recognizing that people make this tradeoff willingly.
As for why poor people are more likely to be obsese, there are a couple simple reasons. First, poor people are more likely to prefer immediate to defered gratifcation, in good part because a preference for immediate gratification can lead to poverty - not all poor people have a problem deferring gratification, but if you have a problem deferring gratification, you're more likely to end up poor.
Second, poor people tend to put a lower dollar value on their health, and hence are willing to trade it for less gratification. Imagine that a person's utility function is the sum of a term for health, a term for savings (which represents anticipated hapiness from spending of saved money later and peace of mind), and a term for happiness from consumption, and that all terms provide equal but diminishing utility per unit as they increase. Let's say that a rich person starts with 10 units of health, and 24 units of wealth that can be allocated to either savings or consumption, but a poor person starts with the same health, but half the units of wealth. The rich people would distribute their units as 12 consumption, 12 savings, and 10 health - they'd want to spend wealth on means to improve their health. On the other hand, the poor person would distribute their units as 6 consumption, 6 savings, and 10 health.
Say we introduce a transaction that allows a unit of health and a unit of wealth to be traded for two units of consumption happiness by eating in a pleasurable but unhealthy manner. The rich will pass in this scenario since their wealth gives them a high level of consumption-derived happiness already relative to their health. The poor, on the other hand, will trade in some health to increase their consumption happiness and free money up for savings - in this scenario, they would trade 2 or 3 units to get all of their components to either 7 or 8. You can make the model more realistic by adding in health services where wealth is traded for more health, and the option for different health/wealth/consumption value tradeoffs (foie gras vs Big Macs), but the fundamental relation in which lower wealth results in a greater willingness to trade health for consumption-derived hapiness will persist.
Posted by: MattXIV | January 15, 2007 5:08 PM