These are fat times in politics. Literally. Nearly 400 obesity-related bills were introduced in state legislatures across the country last year–more than double the number in 2003. A quarter of them were passed into law, up from only 12% two years before. In Washington the word obesity appears in 56 bills introduced during the current Congress; this, the Wall Street Journal points out, is fast catching up with the number containing the word gun. Surgeon General Richard Carmona says obesity is a greater threat than terrorism. Some public-health advocates have begun urging the government to put a warning label on soft drinks; others are calling for a “fat tax” on fast food. When voters and the possibility of big public spending are involved, you can be sure the politicians will discover a problem. The stats are depressingly familiar: more than 60% of us are overweight, and the percentage of us who are considered obese has nearly doubled since 1980. Health-care spending attributable to obesity reached $75 billion in 2003, by some estimates, with taxpayers shelling out more than half of that through Medicare and Medicaid programs. Last month Medicare increased its financial obligation to the problem by announcing it would cover bariatric surgery, a procedure aimed at weight loss that generally costs $25,000 for a simple case. Government researchers estimate that obesity is associated with anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 deaths a year. Most alarming of all, the rates of obesity among children and teens have tripled in the past 25 years. Health-care providers say they are seeing something of an epidemic of potentially lethal Type 2 diabetes, once known as the adult-onset version of the disease, among children as young as 10 and 11. “Without some intervention, this is the first generation of young Americans, being born today, who are expected to have a shorter life span than their parents or grandparents,” says Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, a Republican, who wrote a book about his 110-lb. weight loss and made a healthy America his top priority as chairman of the National Governors Association. That prediction of diminishing life expectancy was published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine by a group of university researchers; other experts have disputed it as overly dire. Huckabee, who is a possible 2008 presidential contender, has given state employees in Arkansas exercise breaks instead of smoking breaks. The state’s public school children are screened for their body mass index, an indirect measure of body fat, and confidential reports are mailed to their parents. Huckabee wants to experiment with a system in which food stamps would be worth more if they were spent on healthy purchases like fruits and vegetables. Nearly every state has taken some steps on obesity, mostly centered on children. In the past year, Arizona set nutritional standards for all food and beverages sold on school grounds. California banned the sale of junk food as snacks in schools starting next year. Kentucky requires students to engage in vigorous physical activity for 30 minutes a day or 150 minutes a week and next year will prohibit its schools from serving that staple of Southern cuisine, deep-fried foods. Maryland plans to put timing devices on school vending machines to limit access during school hours. Many states plan to make nutrition instruction part of their curriculums.
