Saturday 12th July 2003
Hi. It’s me. Hunter.
-- Sen. Deborah Oritz -- Michael Jacobson Fast foods labelled as addictive. As addictive, perhaps, as nicotine or heroin.
What the fuck went so wrong with people that the people in power are stupid enough that they think everyone under them is stupid enough that they need Big fuckin’ Brother taking away their Camels and Little Debbies? Is it the Christian mentality of ‘If there weren’t a god, then there’d be nothing keeping me from raping and stealing and killing’?
You might’ve noticed that I haven’t exactly done jack shit with any of my projects lately. That’s because, well, I haven’t exactly done jack shit with any of my projects lately. I’ve been too busy downloading hentai [25.6 gigabytes so far], and reading articles.
Reading has taught me a lot of things, though. It’s taught me that America is no longer the land of the free…it’s the land of the fat.
And by golly if there aren’t people out there who think they need to do something about it.
Let’s see....
There’s this guy in California, Stephen Joseph, who thinks that Oreos should be banned from sale to children. He filed a lawsuit against Nabisco when he apparently found out for the first time ever that Oreos had fat in them.
Whoda thunk it....
Oreos. Have fat.
But not just any fat. Ah, no. Oreos have TRANS fat. Trans fat. And Stevie here seems to think that trans fat is so fucking dangerous that kids need to be sheltered from it.
Excuse me, but....
What the FUCK is trans fat? Changing fat? Travelling fat? Across fat?
I don’t fucking know....
Nor do I care. What I do care about is this ‘danger’ thing. Is trans fat truly dangerous? Is this something that should be banned from schools, and from access to children, because, well, they might sneak them past the metal detectors and cops already installed in their schools and kill twelve kids at lunch, and blow up the computer lab with them?
Oreos? Dangerous? Come on....
The lawsuit, by the way, has been withdrawn.
But they’re not the only target. Oh no....
There’s also soda! Yes, soda, that evil, evil beverage that needs to be kept away from children as if it was beer.
There’s already been a ban voted in. The Los Angeles Unified School District, as of 2004, will no longer allow the sale of any soft drinks at the 667 schools within their district. Apparently, they seem to think that 40% of their students are ‘obese’, and that this ban will make them magically healthy and not-so-obese again.
That survey, of course, wasn’t of the full 736,000 or so students, but of a hand-picked 900-student sampling...."The problem is that Americans have lost signs of moderation, and fail to recognize how many additional calories soda adds to their diets." There’s also a tax proposed by someone in Sacramento [noticing a California trend yet?] that would amount to twenty-one cents per gallon of syrup in bottled drinks, and two dollars per gallon of syrup used to create soft drinks in soda fountains.
Why? Because they need the money to fund school-based health programmes and after-school ‘childhood obesity prevention’ activities.
And the bigger why: why the war on my caffeinated fizzy goodness? It’s not the caffeine, that’s for sure....
It’s because soda makes you FAT! Because kids, apparently, make the terrible error of mistaking a 20 ounce bottle of soda as one serving instead of the two and a half it apparently is, and that can equate, somehow, to eighteen whole pounds a year.
Also: there’s science to back up the bans on soda. Oh yeah. Science. Science that makes antismoking science and creation science look like Newtonian fucking Physics.
Like the study that links soda consumption with bone fractures in young females. No idea how much soda these ‘young girls’ consumed; no idea whether or not there was a difference in bone density that was caused by other factors; no idea whether these girls played sports, fell down stairs, or got the shit beat out of them by their parents. Just that they ‘yes’, consumed soda, and ‘yes’, broke a bone. And the study itself states that ‘causality cannot be inferred from the data’.
The other study caused a lovely shockwave of ‘every can of soda makes children sixty percent more likely to become supersized!’ astonishment. The study asked a bunch of Bostonian middleschoolers about their television viewing habits and soda consumption over the period of a month.
I can’t remember how much television or soda I consumed over the past thirty days; what twelve year old is going to know, or care?
Again, this study doesn’t even claim that it can link the two ‘for sure’. But that’s okay; it’s not required. It’s a study, therefore, it’s holy fuckin’ writ.
So: soda causes fat and causes bone breakage and is dangerous, thus it ought not be sold in school. Or to children. Or something.
I’ll get back to that later....
Moving on: I assume that everyone’s heard of the lawsuit filed against McDonalds, BurgerKing, KFC, and all those other ‘fast food’ restaurants by fat kids [or for fat kids; or something], claiming that these restaurants are responsible, due to the fact that there are no warning labels or nutritional information mentioned on the menus, for making kids fat.
Which, of course, leads to the natural reaction of having nutritional warnings on menus that make the menus equal to the page count of a healthily bloated novel…
Now that Big Food [media term; not mine] are coming under fire, some companies are pre-emptively deciding to take measures to ‘encourage healthier lifestyles in youngsters’. Kraft is going to stop marketing in schools, and cut down on portion sizes in their little Lunchable thingies.
Because no way in hell will parents ever send two....
Which, of course, leads to the kids crying about how their parents let them go hungry....
Which means that the parents are neglecting their children....
Which means that the parents are bad parents....
Which means that social services steps in and takes the kids away and gives them to parents who will send two....
Which makes the kids fat....
Which....
Which logically leads us to legislation! And taxes!
That’s right. Legislation.
Senator Deborah Oritz, from California is pushing several obesity bills through in California – including the aforementioned one banning soda from a schoolchild’s line of fucking sight....
She also wants various taxes levied, and the nutritional facts and warnings posted all over menus.
In the case of the schools, a co-sponsor of the anti-soda-in-schools bill thought that schools were putting finances over the childrens’ health. Soda machines brought money that obviously wasn’t coming from, say, the state, where it should’ve been coming from, and allowed them to provide more for the kids. Which somehow logically [for the co-sponsor anyway] bridged into a gripe about how the vending machines in the state offices only sold chips.
Moving beyond California, there’s been regulations proposed to ban good ol’ Ronald McDonald – and if you think that’s just silly, who among you remembers Joe Camel? I wonder if that would extend to the mouse that advertises Chuckie Cheese, and that horrid little happy panda that they use at the Chinese restaurant chain around here....
And let’s not forget the Obesity Prevention Task Forces!
But how on Earth will we fund it all?
TAXES!
Fat taxes. Taxes on ‘bad foods’, unhealthy foods, foods that have been deemed ‘not good for you’ by the government.
"We could envision taxes on butter, potato chips, whole milk, cheeses and meat."
CSPIAnd not just the foods, but the things that empower laziness.
Cars, televisions, videogames. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, some Washington based thing, not only demands governmental control of what we, the people, eat, but demands taxes on our television sets, cars, and videogames – raising the prices so that we can’t afford them, and so that those who can afford them dump a bunch of money into these Obesity Prevention Task Forces. Oh, they also want to double the tax on beer.
They think that making shit too expensive will somehow get us to walk more, or something. Can’t afford a car? Tough shit; walk. Because you sure as hell ain’t affording the bus, either.
There’s also proposed taxes on television ads. Yeah, they don’t just want to keep them from being shown to little kids, they want to make sure that the people advertising have to pay taxes on the advertising time.
I have to wonder how long it’ll be before they decide that you can’t advertise anything resembling food on television…
And if you think you can escape this shit by leaving America, you’re wrong. Australia is up in arms about its ‘Obesity Epidemic’, and the British Medical Association is endorsing a value-added tax of 17.5 percent on fatty foods – a tax similar to one being successfully imposed upon unsaturated-fat containing products in Sri Lanka, allegedly.
Okay, so I lied. That’s not the next logical step. It’s fucking retarded. How could they—the government—possibly justify sticking their noses into such a private matter as one’s own weight?
Lots of ways. The most obvious is that fat people cost the taxpayer money. That’s right, YOU pay for their fat, just like YOU pay for the smoker’s diseases from their ‘filthy habit’.
Except that’s not true. It never has been. It never will be. At least not in the cases of smokers.
It can almost be argued that the morbidly obese do end up on social security and get free medical care, but it’s also true that the obese make far less frequent visits to doctors, for whatever reason.
But that doesn’t matter, does it? Because they’ll cook up whatever figures they want to, ranging from “Obesity and overweight people cost us 99.2 billion a year” to “Obesity increases health care costs 33% and prescription cost 77%, and 10% of all health care costs are due to obesity, and half of those are paid for by Medicare and Medicaid,” to Obesity having a medical cost, total, of 93 billion dollars, and half of that figure being covered by Medicare/Medicaid.
All of those figures are put to shame by the CDC’s estimate that obese people cost the US economy $117 billion.
And that was in 2000.
And those figures seemed to state that the numbers were up from the Surgeon General’s estimation that 61% of all Americans were overweight in 1999, and the theory that obesity causes 300,000 deaths a year.
And it’s on the rise!
Yeah, sure, nobody can agree there, can they? But that’s okay, because they don’t have to. There are other ways to justify legislation and taxes, besides ‘societal costs’.
Like this:
New and potentially explosive findings on the biological effects of fast food suggest that eating yourself into obesity isn’t simply down to a lack of self-control. Some scientists are starting to believe that bingeing on foods that are excessively high in fat and sugar can cause changes to your brain and body that make it hard to say no. A few even believe that foods can trigger changes that are similar to full-blown addiction.
Apparently, since ‘fast food’ has so many more calories than a normal home-cooked meal, eating it can result in your brain being incapable of noticing that you’re full when you are. There’s a hormone called leptin that apparently tells your brain to tell you to stop eating, and since you’re getting more calories in less of a portion, or whatever, your body develops a resistence.
It makes very little sense to me, really. But that’s mostly because my body recognises a burger and fries from McDonalds as being just about the same amount of food as a burger and fries from any other restaurant.
But hey, who am I to argue with a study that shows that forcing a diet of twenty-five percent sugar on a rat, and then taking away the sugar, causes anxiety and symptoms that could be construed as ‘withdraw’, not to mention hormonal drops ‘just like’ those changes in heroin addicts.
Of course, if that doesn’t work – and it seems to be working – we can just bring back Sick Building Syndrome, only this time we’ll apply it to food, and blame obesity on living in a “Toxic Food Environment”
Yeah.
Right.
So we’re now calling being overweight a ‘disease’ that’s become an ‘epidemic’, and an ‘addiction’, and we’re living in a “Toxic Food Environment”. Because we’re living in a ‘Toxic Food Environment’, we no longer have the free will to avoid this shit.
Here comes White Knight Government to SAVE US!
"Until we accept that it is a bigger problem than one of individual discipline, we probably won't be too successful in turning it around." It’s so horrible and tragic and sad! Look, it’s all around us! In our schools and in our grocery stores! And our convenience stores! Whoever would’ve predicted a day when you could buy food in a gas station!
It was bad enough when they started selling gas in restaurants....
“I’d like a number one, cheese on that, some barbecue sauce, and fill’er up....”
And, of course, until this Toxic Food Environment goes away, obesity will remain an epidemic disease. Until food stops being cheap and tasty and available and promoted all to hell…
Oh: let’s not forget the scare tactics. The articles on exercise, which tie into the articles on obesity online, telling men that if they don’t exercise, their dick won’t work.
Actually, y’know what? Let’s forget that....
I think I feel a rant coming on; they’re still legal, right?
How fucking disgusting.
Is anyone besides me smelling something along the lines of FoodNazi: the Spawn of the SmokingNazi here? I know I’m not the only one.
Sure, it’ll start slow, with SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: EATING FAST FOOD MAY LEAD TO OBESITY, or FATTENING FOODS MAY BE BAD FOR YOUR HEATH or EATING HEALTHY NOW MAY HELP REDUCE YOUR RISK FOR HEART DISEASE, or LOSING WEIGHT NOW MAY REDUCE THE RISK OF DYING FROM CANCER, or NOT EATING HEALTHY CAN CAUSE LOW BIRTHWEIGHT OR EVEN MISSCARRIAGE, but those will eventually progress into pictures of slabs of fat, just for gross-out tactics, like those big ads in Canada. And then comes the legislation banning the advertising of food by cartoon character, which progresses into the banning of advertising of food in all mediums, because, of course, food is an addiction. And we’ll have Obesity Prevention Task Forces and Weight Loss Initiatives that’ll be funded by settlements and taxes that drive up hamburgers from six bucks to ten bucks, cans of soda from sixty-five cents to three or four bucks, and cookies for twelve dollars a pound.
And you thought cinemas charged a lot for their food now....
While there might never be state-sanctioned militaristic mandatory morning PT for everyone in America, we might well someday see the moving of snickers bars from the easily accessible front-of-the-counter to the rear of the counter, and mandatory ID checks for age verification, and possibly weight verification, which may well be done either by ID or by scales put out front, or built into the floors in front of the cash register.
“You’re 5’5”? And it says here you’re 100lbs? I’m going to have to verify that, Ma’am....”
You must weigh this much to buy this product.
Of course, if you’re overweight, you’ll be required to buy something else instead, and restricted from buying the burger or the snickers bar, and instead offered a salad, or some other healthy shit. Or maybe you’ll be brought a vegetarian burger instead.
But that doesn’t mean the rest of us won’t be paying for the fatties.
Oh yeah, and if you let your kids have Oreos? Don’t let anyone find out that you even have them in the house, or you might lose your kids. Or simply lose custody of them to your spouse, or have your visitation rights revoked.
You might as well be smoking around them. You horrible parent you....
And hey, what about the effects of a person’s obesity on others? I can’t wait until that starts getting thrown into the mix....
Sure, maybe society does need to change a little. I’ll buy that. Maybe the communities, workplaces, schools, and public transportation all need to change their attitude and stop enabling the overweight just like they stopped enabling the smoker, or maybe we just need to stop fucking taking away a person’s own responsibility and start placing the blame where it belongs, on the fucking individual. Nobody forced you to pick up that cigarette and light it; nobody forced you switch over from foot or equine power to horsepower [although it can most certainly be argued that society demands motorised transportation]; nobody forced you to hit the drive through at McDonalds and get that supersized BigMac with cheese, and the large shake and extra salt on the fries, with extra mayo instead of packing yourself a nice healthy lunch. I sure as fuck didn’t, and I don’t think I should be punished for your decisions either.
That, of course, is just my fat free, cholesterol free, all natural opinion....