Friday 8 September 2023

The futility of the war on obesity

I've written an article for the new website Unfiltered about why the government is wasting its time and our money trying to tackle obesity by messing around with the food supply.
 

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. The “public health” lobby is constantly undermined by the public. Generally speaking, people know what they want and they are going to get it, even if they have to spend slightly more money or walk around a supermarket a bit more.

You might be able to suppress the sales of a new variety of Magnum by banning adverts for it, but you won’t suppress the demand for ice cream. You could, I suppose, tax “unhealthy” food at the level at which cigarettes are taxed. That would no doubt have an effect, but no party is going to propose it because the public would hate it.

Any reasonably affluent and free society is going to have a lot of fat people in it. The government can’t make people exercise more and the tools it has to intervene in the food supply are, in practice, too trivial to make any difference. It will take many years of failure and huge sums of wasted money before politicians admit that this is one problem they cannot do much about.

 
Do read the rest. No paywall.

 






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