government needs to lose weight

[undergroundpanther]

Government needs to lose weight!
Posted by undergroundpanther in General Discussion (01/01/06 through 01/22/2007)
Thu Jul 06th 2006, 04:30 AM
How ironic that just as an already-bloated government is taking on major new powers, it is exhorting us to lose weight. But that’s exactly what Surgeon General David Satcher is calling for. In his recently released “Call To Action To Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity,” Satcher writes, “Our ultimate goal is to set priorities and establish strategies and actions to reduce overweight and obesity.”

It’s not as though people haven’t heard that being fat might be unhealthy. Books, websites, and television and radio commercials bombard us with that message and the various ways to shed pounds. If anything, people worry too much about their weight. Few have gone broke promoting a fad diet.

That great debunker of junk science, Steven Malloy, writes that the government’s statistics on the prevalence of fat people are based on “suspect research,” such as unverified telephone surveys and “an arbitrary definition of ‘overweight’ based on ‘body mass index.’” Malloy adds that the government’s estimate of 300,000 deaths a year in the battle of the bulge is “unadulterated junk science.” The New England Journal of Medicine also finds the data unreliable, Malloy says. He also criticizes Satcher’s report because it ignores important differences between being overweight and being obese. Obesity is unhealthy, he says, “but the evidence supposedly linking mild-to-moderate overweight with increased health problems is murky, based only on flaky statistics.” Malloy even debunks the alleged relationship between childhood and adult weight problems: the evidence is lacking.

But forget all that. Even if all the medical alarmism is justified, why is it any of the government’s business? Conceded, that question sounds outlandish these days, accustomed as we are to believing that everything is the government’s business. But once we remind ourselves that, as George Washington is reputed to have said, “government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force,” we should be wary of its grand scheme to slim us down. That scheme consists of a long “menu” of “activities and interventions in five key settings: families and communities, schools, health care, media and communications, and worksites.” In other words, we are to have more intrusion from Washington, D.C., in everything from our families and communities to our worksites in order to get us to lose weight. Where in the Constitution is the central government delegated the power to do this?

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http://www.fff.org/comment/com0202j.asp

[PDJane]

1. I think if the government lost

the CIA and most of the Pentagon, especially the religious right, and put the justice department on a strictly apoliticaal diet, there would be a great improvement in the lifestyle of most Americans. You might be able to afford things like health care, real schooling complete with phys ed, stuff like that.........

[msongs]

2. how much do bush and cheney weigh? nt

[AndyTiedye]

3. The Government is Concerned About the Quality of its Potential Cannon Fodder

We have seen this before.

When the government starts making a lot of noise about our physical fitness or lack thereof,
it means they are going to start up the draft soon.

One of my friends, who was a bit heavy to begin with, managed to EAT his way to a 4F back in the day.

They hate it when that happens.