How Government Unleashed Obesity in the USA
"Government is now involved in supposedly fighting the problem. It was once a public policy priority to bring food to the hungry. A chicken in every pot. Now the government is more interested in taking chickens out of the pot.
New York City is on the cutting edge, banning sodas of a certain size and restricting the use of trans fats because the politicians know what is good for us.
There is still a refusal to admit that government itself contributed to the problem with its national diet from 1977, the one that put down the things that everyone today says is the key to staying thin in a sedentary world and pushing the very stuff that experts say make us fat. Government told us to stop eating beef and eggs and start eating more biscuits and pasta. If we did eat meat, it should be drained dry. Shock: We ballooned.
The official government guidelines provided a policy infrastructure that set the stage for the growth in obesity. The war on meat, eggs, and cheese was on, and the boosting of bread and starch began.
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Director Tom Naughton ate normal amounts of food at McDonald’s for 30 days, cutting down on fries and periodically tossing the muffin part of the Egg McMuffin. He also doubled his walking daily. At the end of the experiment, he had lost 12 pounds.
In the course of the film, he shows that everything the government thought was right in the 1970s turned out to be wrong. Politicians had latched onto a fad and codified it into law.
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The use of corn as a sweetener (and as a gasoline additive, too!) is a result that is being brought about by public policy priorities. It’s not what Coca-Cola would choose to do if the market prevailed, and the proof is as close as your local Mexican grocery that delivers coke with real sugar.
What effects might this have on American diets? As the lead researcher in a 2010 Princeton University study involving rats argued: “Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn’t true, at least under the conditions of our tests.”
They found that “excessive consumption of high-fructose corn syrup found in many beverages may be an important factor in the obesity epidemic.”
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The big cost here is freedom itself: the freedom to eat and to trade and to work out our own solutions for our lives based on trade and discovery.
If this pathetic history proves anything, it is that you can’t trust government to tell you what you should or should not put in your pie hole. Yet we inadvertently defer to them every day, even without knowing it.
Stop trusting the government to tell you how to live."
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