Adventures at Midlife

The NYTimes Freakonomics blog, one of my favorite sites, continues to poke at the “obesity epidemic,” most recently with an interview with Eric Finkelstein, health economist and coauthor of The Fattening of America. “Modern society,” he says, “is giving Americans many more incentives to gain weight than to lose it. We are, in fact, victims of our success as a nation.”

The two most obvious factors are: 1) the abundance of cheap, tasty foods; and 2) the new technologies that allow us to be increasingly more productive at work and at home while burning fewer calories. For example, between 1980 and 2005, the price of food fell 14 percent relative to non-food items, so it is thus not surprising that we are eating more food.

I remember once seeing a graph that compared the rise in rates of obesity with the rise in the use of cheap high-fructose corn syrup in America. It probably wasn’t very scientific, but it was impressive: the patterns were pretty comparable. (And just try to find something tasty on the grocery store shelf that DOESN’T have HF corn syrup in it.)

To his credit, Finkelstein rejects the notion of an “epidemic” of obesity, at one point even comparing it to an “epidemic” of flat-screen TVs in America. But he doesn’t wave away the problem.

The reality is that no matter how we label it, as long as there is a demand for labor saving devices and cheap, tasty food, there will be a significant obesity problem. The United States has the most advanced economy in the world, so we saw the obesity spike first, but other nations are quickly catching up.

And as for recent attempts by the government to regulate obesity — including this appalling development — he offers his “Uncle Al” defense:

In my book, I talk a lot about my Uncle Al, a smart and successful attorney who also happens, not by accident, to be very overweight. In fact, he’s overweight because instead of spending his time dieting and exercising, he has spent his time building a very successful law firm. I see no reason why the government should get Uncle Al [or other adults] to change his behavior if he does not want to.

In sharp contrast, children are unable to make rational choices, unlike Uncle Al. I think that the government (and parents) have a critical role to minimize the possibility of children growing up to regret the diet and exercise choices they may have made as uninformed youths.

I was quite taken with Uncle Al. I could picture him behind his desk in his wood-paneled office with a full calendar of clients, a box of cigars in the top drawer and an impressive stock portfolio on his computer screen. Al may not be skinny, but he’s the embodiment of the American dream. And who’s to say Al and others like him aren’t healthy? It’s cheaper and easier to be overweight today than it was a few decades back, says Finkelstein, and, thanks to advances in medical technology, the health costs —and some of the risks — of obesity continue to decline.

To sum it up in economics terms, obesity in America is a byproduct of our success in creating large amounts of cheap, tasty food; plentiful labor-saving devices; and drugs and services that compensate for what some would call obesity-related ailments — the high blood pressure, diabetes and heart ailments that also plague the thin. We could almost call this good news if we weren’t so obsessed with everyone adhering to the same body norms.

I can’t speak for the book, but at no point in the interview did Finkelstein attribute obesity to a weakness in will. I found his discussion of the many facets of obesity to be very erudite. It’s a complex issue.

But I am wary of getting the government too involved. It would be well-meant, but could certainly be heavy-handed, expensive to enforce and ultimately ineffective. Says Finkelstein, “[W]hen it comes to obesity, any effort by the government to encourage people to lose weight, unless it saves more money than it costs, will only raise our taxes even more, regardless of whether or not the measure is effective at getting people to lose weight.”

So go ahead and make school lunches more healthy, and by all means bring back the physical education programs. But I’ll turn off the computer games, take my children and grandchildren to the gym and make sure they eat their vegetables, thank you very much.

And please quit expecting them —or me — to look like models.

This entry was posted on February 13, 2008 at 9:03 am and is filed under Diet wars, Money.