by Jayson Lusk
Kids and parents are even more likely to shy away from school lunches when administrators have to increase prices to offset the costs required to meet the new law’s provision mandating more fresh produce.39 Higher prices at school mean greater incentives for students to seek lunch elsewhere. They also mean tighter budgets for already cash-strapped schools that are now being forced, by federal law, to trade off double helpings of fruit for extra teachers. The costs of the policy are substantially more than the outlays by the federal government. The much larger costs are the ones borne by all the local school districts.
The truth is that research shows that interventions in school-lunch programs have had very limited effectiveness if any at all.40 Even when kids are required to eat more veggies at school, they often compensate by eating fewer veggies at home.41 Studies comparing schools that have removed vending machines to those that have not find virtually no effect on total soda intake and obesity.42 At least the bill’s sponsors can sit back comforted in their do-gooder activities, while janitors in schoolyards across the nation haul out garbage bags of food the elite have mandated but that kids won’t eat.
It is not as though public school cafeterias are currently a bastion of free choice. More than 90 percent of public schools participate in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), whose original goal to increase demand for agricultural products has been broadened over the years to include nutritional objectives. In fact, now the food police see the NSLP as an opportunity to sneak in all kinds of new restrictions on farmers, as witnessed by recent legislative attempts to require school-lunch purchases to adhere to new animal welfare rules and local-food sourcing requirements.
NSLP partially funds free lunches and breakfasts for underprivileged children. But that’s not enough to cover the costs, and local schools typically pick up the remainder of the tab by eating into their own budgets and by charging the richer students, who don’t qualify. Schools take the funds to help feed needy kids in their district, but in exchange, they are required to follow all kinds of rules on what can be served in lunch lines. Because the federal government reimbursement rates for NSLP have not kept up with rising food costs, many schools have started offering separate buffet and snack lines (exempt from the NSLP rules) that offer items kids will actually eat, to boost the bottom line. So, we have a mess: a convoluted mix of policies that try to get enough calories in the bellies of poor kids so they’re learning during the day and not starving at night, while simultaneously trying to get the richer kids, who can have anything they want at home, to eat a few more carrots at school.
Look, I want kids to eat healthily, too. My father ended his career as the superintendent of the public school systems in rural Wellman and Lockney, Texas. On his watch, the Wellman school cafeteria constructed the first-ever salad bar seen on campus. My point isn’t that parents and local school boards shouldn’t think about how to improve children’s health. My point is, who is in the best position to make this determination? It’s easy for someone in Washington to enact mandates without any knowledge of the location-specific costs and trade-offs. As a USDA report put it, “Policymakers face hard choices because the children served by NSLP have diverse nutritional needs, making a single policy for all difficult to craft.”43 Will policies requiring local foods, less whole milk, cage-free eggs, or two servings of fresh vegetables cause foods to be more prone to food safety risks or take more time to prepare? Or will they cause kids to go off campus for lunch? Or increase costs and thus class size? These are real trade-offs that only local school districts can adequately address given their own local conditions and knowledge.
Consider, for example, what Christopher Kimball, the founder of America’s Test Kitchen and the star of the PBS television show by the same name, had to say about a school district in Vermont: “The school is planting fruit trees. The parents have ponied up their hard-earned money to help purchase local beef instead of what the USDA provides. They are starting to grow many of their own vegetables … In true Vermont fashion, these folks are not waiting around until somebody else comes up with a solution. They are just doing it.”44
These aren’t the same choices I would have advocated, but it’s not my kids’ school and I’m not paying Vermont taxes. So, I say more power to them. The choices made by a school in inner-city Detroit will likely be different, but like the folks in Vermont, the ones in Detroit know more about what their kids want and what they’re willing and able to pay to get it.
Then we have the food elite’s proposals to reengineer the food stamp program. As if it weren’t bad enough that there are people who find themselves in such dire straits that they need extra cash from the government to feed their families, the food elite now wants to use them as guinea pigs in their grand food experiments. In my regular job as a researcher, I can’t even ask you a single survey question without having to jump through a bunch of hoops mandated by the federal government to protect the rights of human subjects involved in research, but apparently it is okay with the food elite to play all kinds of games with people so poor they have trouble affording groceries.
Food stamp recipients are already prohibited from using their funds to buy fast food, and now the food police want to keep that money from being spent on items such as soda and other evils; Pollan wants food stamp participants to get a free ride at farmers’ markets—he says, “Food-stamp debit cards should double in value whenever swiped at farmers’ markets.”45 I want food stamp recipients to eat as healthily as everyone else. But I’m not walking in their shoes. Those of us who have no idea what it’s like to have a minimum-wage job and four hungry mouths to feed do not have enough insight into the life of someone in this situation to tell such a person how he should spend his time and money. Rather, it seems the food elite want food stamp recipients to pass a test to prove they know which grocery aisles are sufficiently politically correct enough to enter. I wish we lived in a world where food stamps weren’t needed, but reality is harsh. As such, I am not opposed to such meager support for those who find themselves down on their luck, but I can’t understand why we’d want to make the people we’re trying to help jump through hoops to get it. Food stamps should be an opportunity for compassion, not manipulation.
The food police are right about one thing: it is time for a change in farm policy. But as Hillary Clinton tried to warn us when running for president against Barack Obama, preaching change isn’t enough—the question is what kind of change we want. Concerns over growing budget deficits will likely mean a different kind of future for farm policy. There are ways to do farm policy more cheaply and effectively. The answer isn’t more government control; it’s less.
THE THIN LOGIC OF FAT TAXES
According to the Centers for Disease Control, we are in the midst of an epidemic: an apparent scourge of fatness.1 It used to be that health professionals reserved the word epidemic for the outbreak of infectious communicable diseases. The fact that obesity is now widely heralded as an epidemic says as much about our pant size as it does the hype surrounding the problem. Fatness is a lot scarier when couched in terms that make you think it’s something you can catch from an uncontrollable sneeze on the bus.
Yep, it’s true. Americans’ waistlines have been growing—for at least a century.2 Look at the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens circa 1630 and you’ll see that being a bit rotund was once socially desirable, signaling, as it did, that you had enough money to eat what you wanted. Today, a few extra pounds aren’t seen as a symbol of progress. We’re told not only that fatness is unhealthy, but that it is apparently uncouth. Signifying the prevailing mind-set that fatness is failure, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released a 2011 report entitled F as in Fat. I thought my grades for phys ed ended in elementary school, but whether we want to be judged or not, a report card is coming. Eric Oliver, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, accurately summarized the food elite’s attitude: “Running through all these perspectives is a paternalistic condescension toward fatness and fat
people—not only do people with this view assume that fatness is inherently bad, but they also presuppose that fat people (that is, minorities and the poor) are too ignorant to know that they should be thin … For many people, trumpeting the ‘problem of obesity’ is an opportunity for them to express both their own moral superiority and their latent class snobbery and racism.”3
But wait a minute. According to the CDC, obesity is killing us. Back in the late 1990s it was estimated that there were almost 300,000 excess deaths due to overweight and obesity, an estimate that CDC researchers subsequently revised upward to almost 400,000. There was only one problem with the story: it was wrong. When the story broke that the CDC estimates were inflated due to miscalculations, Jay Leno remarked, “Not only are we fat, we can’t do math either.”4
Later, researchers published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that there are, in fact, only about twenty-six thousand excess deaths due to overweight and obesity combined, almost fifteen times fewer than the original estimate. To put the new figure in perspective, note that more than thirty thousand people kill themselves in the United States each year, and there are thirty thousand annual deaths from automobile accidents.5 Yet I haven’t heard much about a national “driving epidemic.”
The reality is that pharmaceutical companies and the weight-loss industry make big bucks when fatness goes from a mild nuisance to a certifiable disease. Government agencies such as the CDC and researchers who rely on federal grants also benefit when statistics proclaiming an epidemic can be used to grow research budgets and siphon dollars away from other projects to support the researchers’ agendas.
In the mid-1990s, scores of experts were not content with the rise in obesity. They changed the definition to make it look worse than it actually was. Back in 1998, despite the needle on the scale standing perfectly still, twenty-nine million Americans who were previously considered normal weight suddenly found themselves, according to new academic and government wordsmiths, somehow overweight. An epidemic was created with the stroke of a pen.6
The data revealed another interesting detail, one often ignored by the anti-fat crusaders. There is evidence that people who are overweight (but not obese) actually live a bit longer than people who are normal weight. Individuals aged 25 to 59 who are slightly overweight (say a 6-foot man weighing 200 pounds) are about 17 percent less likely to die in a given year than those who are normal weight (say a 6-foot man weighing 160 pounds).7 We keep a spare tire on our car for a good reason. As for the one around our waist, apparently Mother Nature put it there for a purpose. So, yes, while being extremely overweight will likely cost you a few years of life, being a bit overweight probably does the opposite. Another shocker: there are more than thirty thousand estimated excess deaths from being underweight. At least in terms of longevity, it’s better to be a little plump in your mom jeans than fit in those skinny jeans.
All this squabbling about the correct number of excess deaths is sort of silly. There is no such thing as an “excess death.” The researchers have taken all the deaths they can’t explain with their models and attribute them to the apparent killer of all killers: obesity. Here’s what Eric Oliver had to say about the issue: “The researchers who estimated that obesity costs us 100 million dollars a year did so by calculating all the expenses associated with treating type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, hypertension, gallbladder disease, and cancer … Once again, they simply assumed that if you got heart disease or breast cancer it was because you were fat.”8
At an even deeper level, this kind of research simply looks at correlations between weight and death, but we all know that correlation does not causation make. Being too skinny didn’t cause some people to die—rather, they were frail because they’d already suffered from some other ailment. What’s true for the thin is the same for the fat. The prevalence of the diseases that obesity is supposedly causing has, in most cases, actually gone down over time. One team of researchers found that “[e]xcept for diabetes, [cardiovascular disease] risk factors have declined considerably over the past 40 years in all [body mass index] groups.”9 These are all good signs, except for the case of diabetes.
It is estimated that about 8.3 percent of the U.S. population now has the disease.10 While we know that the prevalence of diabetes is correlated with body weight, experts do not agree on the cause.11 It may be that a genetic predisposition toward insulin resistance causes obesity and diabetes (rather than obesity causing diabetes, as is often asserted). That many obese people are not diabetic also casts doubt on the causal link between weight and the disease. Even the American Diabetes Association says, “Type 1 diabetes is caused by genetics and unknown factors that trigger the onset of the disease; type 2 diabetes is caused by genetics and lifestyle factors.”12 It might be more satisfying to point the finger at farm policies and Big Food, but the real culprit might lie much closer to home.
Even if we could figure out what was going on biologically, we do not know with any degree of certainty whether any of the proposed public policies can do anything to reverse the slowly increasing trend. (Diabetes prevalence rates have increased by 0.11 percent annually since 1980.)13 And while diabetes is a serious problem, there is, as with obesity, a lot of hype surrounding the issue. We hear a lot of concern expressed about the rise of type 2 diabetes among children, but it’s actually hard to find firm statistics on the matter. One study in the Journal of the American Medical Association said, “The prevalence of type II diabetes mellitus in adolescents is low (<1%).”14 Information on the CDC website is downright schizophrenic. The CDC first reports that there is no statistical evidence of increasing type 2 diabetes among most children by saying, “A statistically significant increase in the prevalence of type 2 diabetes among children and adolescents was found only for American Indians.” But then it immediately reverses course by saying, “Type 2 diabetes in children and adolescents already appears to be a sizable and growing problem.”15 The CDC’s own statistics fail to establish evidence of a “sizable and growing problem,” but that hasn’t halted the sizable and growing hysteria.
Some health advocates have resorted to downright falsehoods to promote their cause. A recent ad run by Mayor Bloomberg’s New York City Health Commission featured an amputee with the caption “Portions have grown. So has Type 2 diabetes, which can lead to amputations.” Here’s the problem: the man’s leg wasn’t amputated as a result of diabetes but rather by Photoshop.16 As if that weren’t bad enough, the ad ran a week after the CDC reported that the rate of diabetes-related amputations had fallen by more than half since the 1990s.17
I’m not against our getting to the bottom of the cause of diabetes or carefully considering strategies to help mitigate the disease, but we need to look before we leap. And we need to ensure that the solutions don’t cause more damage than the problem they’re designed to fix.
One detail overlooked in these discussions is that the prevalence of many diseases, and even weight itself, is correlated with age. A nation with a large number of aging baby boomers is biologically bound to be a nation that, as a whole, weighs more and is more likely to develop diseases such as cancer and diabetes. We are living longer, and as a result Americans are suffering more today from old-age illnesses. In the past, we didn’t live long enough to contract the things that now kill us.
Careful researchers calculate age-adjusted measures of obesity, cancer, and diabetes incidence (each of which has risen over the past two decades), but these are statistical extrapolations, not undisputable facts. Ultimately, the question isn’t whether we will die; it’s when and from what. Citing statistics on the number of people dying from this ailment or that—with some supposed link to obesity—sounds scary, but let’s face it, we will all die of something someday. But not as soon as we once did.
Since 1990, during a time when obesity was supposedly taking its huge toll, Americans’ life expectancies have risen 2.5 years. Even those of us who make it to age 65 can expect to live almost
1.5 years longer than 20 years ago.18 Not only are we living longer, but the quality of our lives is better.19 Some of these gains have occurred due to advances in medical technology and increased medical spending. Yet it seems to have escaped the imaginations of many medical health professionals that rising obesity is a rational reaction to better medical technology and to a government-run health care system where the sick no longer have to pay the full costs of treating their ailments.
About 33.8 percent of Americans are today classified as obese.20 This is up from about 14 percent in the early 1970s. Hence the newspaper headlines such as “Obesity Rates Surge, with No End in Sight.”21 The problem with this rhetoric is that the end is in sight and perhaps has already been reached. There has not been a measurable increase in the rate of obesity among men since 2003, and there has not been a measurable increase in the rate of obesity among women since 2000. One group of medical researchers concluded that the prevalence of obesity “may have entered another period of relative stability.”22
I’m not trying to belittle the problems of obesity or diabetes, many of which are real. I’m asking that we take a step back, eschew all the hype, and think through the consequences of the proposed policies. Clearly there are those who are already overweight and want to shed some pounds. The billions of dollars spent annually on weight loss in this country show that many people wish they weighed less. Some of our desire for weight loss is due to status-seeking, but there are legitimate health concerns, too. We all know and love people who suffer from health problems associated with being overweight. While compassion might be a good reason to do something for a friend or family member, it isn’t sufficient justification for government action. When did my weight become someone else’s problem?
In a recent nationwide survey, I asked folks whether they thought different groups—such as food manufacturers and restaurants—were primarily to blame, somewhat to blame, or not to blame for the rise in obesity. Only 37 percent of Americans said that food manufacturers were primarily to blame, and only 22 percent ascribed primary blame to restaurants. (Almost as many, at 17 percent, said that the government was primarily to blame.) The big culprits, according to public opinion? Look in the mirror. More than 80 percent of Americans said that individuals themselves were primarily to blame for the rise in obesity, and 60 percent said that parents were primarily to blame.