Let's talk about soda...

I may have missed someone else commenting on this - but how about revisiting farm subsidies? As in, can we get Monsanto off of local farmers' backs, discourage the production of frankenfoods (also known as GMOs), and encourage/make cheaper the production of healthy & local foods? Just my little 2 cents that might make it easier for people to make healthier choices.... I kinda don't like the "after the fact" efforts & litigating health - it's like, the damage is done and NOW everyone wants to be reactionary?

This isn't a case of "big government" overstepping its boundaries. It is a case of all of us paying for the increasing medical costs for obesity and diabetes and what public policy should look like the front end to save money. Have you read the NYT piece on The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food? It talks about how food companies use science to add the right amount of sugar, fat and salt to food to make it addictive. And these same food companies are the ones we subsidize with our tax dollars to make food that makes us addicted and fat. Of course it should be regulated, taxed, or at the very least, unsubsidized. Big Food is the next Big Tobacco. People used to have this same kind of conversation about tobacco 15-20 years ago. There were lots of "get big government out of the way" and "people should be able to make their own choices" and "poor people shouldn't buy cigarettes with food stamps" conversations then, too. Then we understood that tobacco companies deliberately made their cigarettes addictive and added ingredients that were worse for our health and we got pissed. We figured out how much the tobacco industry was costing us and our healthcare system and they had to pay up. And now cigarettes are taxed like crazy and super expensive to buy and smoking has decreased exponentially. Most states have laws about where you can and can't smoke and where cigarettes can be bought and sold. Junk food and soda is the same! It should be ILLEGAL to sell something that is destructive to our health and costing our healthcare system so much. 

I think we will eventually get to the same place with soda and junk food as we have with tobacco, but it will take time and we will have having a lot of the same type of conversations. Sure, smokers make the choice to smoke, just as obese people make the choice to eat unhealthy things in large portions, but there is NO reason we should be spending our tax dollars to subsidize the companies that are making the food and there is no reason why the food and sodas causing it shouldn't be regulated, taxed or banned. Because the money to pay for the obesity and diabetes healthcare has got to come from somewhere.

Also, Sin Kim is right: the vast majority of people on food assistance work and Wal-Mart has the highest number of employees on public assistance (over 50% of Wal-Mart workers receive public assistance). So while there might be anecedotal stories of people who abuse the system or don't want to work, the most effective way to move people off of the system would be to have Wal-Mart start paying a living wage. Also, the largest number of food stamp recipients are children and their mothers, so it is a myth that there are people out there just gaming the system. There is only 2% fraud rate.

And thanks NFarris, you brought up an excellent point about GMO's and subsidizing crops for junk food. We subsidize corn to the tune of billions of dollars a year and it is in EVERYTHING and it is making us fat and giving us diabetes! Before we start with blaming people for these rapid changes over the last 30 years that have been out of our control, I think we need to reassess our public policies on food, transportation (make communities walkable and increase public transportation) and what we are subsidizing. We need nutrition help, too, but we need to fix some fundamental things that would have HUGE impacts on our health and economy. As formerly obese people who needed surgery to lose weight, I think we can have an important voice in this conversation. But I also think we need to move away from the "people will make their own choices" as the primary arugment and look at the bigger picture.