Many years ago, I overheard three distinguished and decidedly rotund bishops discussing the subject of sin. They ultimately decided that gluttony was their favorite. I find it hard to disagree with their assessment—albeit, thanks to heart surgery, I have recently (and, I hasten to add, quite involuntarily) joined the ranks of the trim and buff.
Despite my newly svelte figure, I find it difficult to be anything but cynical about our ruling elite’s continuing campaign against (horror of horrors!) obesity.
Not content with having driven smokers to huddle furtively in alleys and doorways to indulge their habit, folks like Mayor Bloomburg of New York are set on dishing out the same treatment to the plump.
A couple of decades back, the notion of the mayor of a major city banning large containers of soda would have been seen for what it is—a gross intrusion on personal liberty, not to say totalitarianism stretched to the limits of lunacy. Today Bloomburg—who, himself, does not appear to be in the least bit undernourished—is hailed as a hero by the food fascists.
It is little short of amazing to see how much the food faddist lobby has achieved in the decade or so that has passed since the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched the campaign to demonize obesity.
It did so with “a study” claiming that obesity was taking over where tobacco left off as America’s “top underlying preventable cause of death.”
Naturally, one vice or other had to assume tobacco’s role as ritual demon for the country’s health police. After all, government and its allies at the tort bar had squeezed about as much cash as they could reasonably hope to extract—in the short term at least—from the nation’s smokers.
Frankly, I would have found the CDC study just tad more convincing if it had singled out a rather more politically correct habit for investigation and demonization.
Why on earth, for example, did the CDC pick on obesity for study when they could with greater justification have studied the very considerable health risks entailed
in promiscuous sex?
Indeed, evidence would suggest that sexually transmitted diseases, such as HIV, present a far greater health threat. Indeed, they incapacitate and kill people a darned sight faster than overeating.
The effects of recreational drug use on health might also have been a rewarding field of inquiry for the CDC. After all, we have been fighting the “drug war” at enormous expense for best part of half a century, presumably on the grounds that cocaine and heroin are a good deal more damaging to the health than hot dogs and hamburgers.
But, instead, the CDC opted to study obesity and, by George, they swiftly got to the heart of the matter.
“It’s tragic,” explained Dr. Julie Gerberding, the author of the study, “Our worst fears were confirmed … Obesity has got to be job No. 1 for us in terms of chronic diseases.”
I am not suggesting that smoking and overeating are without risk and are to be encouraged. Far from it. They are certainly unhealthy habits. But they are by no means the only unhealthy habits adopted by folks in this country. Neither are they the most unhealthy of habits.
The fact of the matter is that this study would have been rather more convincing if it had not been preceded by a long drawn-out crescendo of complaint about the fast food industry’s alleged responsibility for the “national epidemic of obesity” from food fascists and the tort bar.
Come to think of it, I might have felt a tad more comfortable with this study if, for instance, it were easier to serve writs on the advocates of unbridled promiscuity and recreational drug use than it is to serve them on folks in the nation’s multi-billion dollar fast food industry. GPH✠
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