The past few weeks have seen a couple of spectacular foot-shooting episodes in the “war” on obesity from those who claim to have magic bullets. First, there was the apparent proposal to allow the government to remove obese kids from their families, which turned its co-authors, David Ludwig, director of the Obesity Prevention Center at Children’s Hospital in Boston, and Lindsey Murtagh, a lawyer at Harvard’s School of Public Health, into stand-ins for the child catcher in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”
Anyone who is on the medical frontlines of childhood obesity deserves a break, given the horror stories they’ve seen, but Ludwig and Murtagh’s failure to anticipate how their message would come across is baffling. Ludwig has subsequently deplored the way the media “wildly” exaggerated their paper, but their conclusions were hardly ambiguous: “State intervention may serve the best interests of many children with life-threatening obesity, comprising the only realistic way to control harmful behaviors.” The rhetorical fact is that they did not write their piece to make the caveats sound more persuasive than the proposal.
Perhaps the academic medical establishment needs to employ the modern equivalent of court jesters, to point out when academics sound like cranks or cuckoos — before the media performs the same function.
The second incident involves the idea that we can tax away the sin of obesity. As I’ve noted in this column before, the U.S. media loves soda taxes. Overwhelmingly, news reporting and editorializing between 2008 and 2010 described them as a brilliant prescription for reducing obesity, in effect quoting only those academics who advocate for them.
The latest outing of these ideas comes from the New York Times’ Mark Bittman, who has supersized the core idea of soda taxation to include taxing everything that’s not good for us. And once again, the public is treated to a masterpiece of selective reporting.
“A 20 percent increase in the price of sugary drinks nationally could result in about a 20 percent decrease in consumption, which in the next decade could prevent 1.5 million Americans from becoming obese and 400,000 cases of diabetes, saving about $30 billion. It’s fun — inspiring, even — to think about implementing a program like this,” writes Bittman.
But dear, sweet Mr. Bittman, it’s only “fun” and “inspiring” when you ignore the math that produces this wonderland. If you look at the entire body of taxation and nutrition literature — the work that you and your journalism colleagues magically fail to find whenever you write about this topic — Alice pretty much stays fat.
Indeed, as one well-designed study (Ebbeling et al.) found after replacing sugared drinks in teens for six months with non-sugared drinks, a switch that achieved an 82 percent reduction in soda consumption, there was no statistically significant change in the teens’ weight overall. It was only among a subset of kids, who were overweight to begin with and who were high soda consumers, that there was any significant weight loss.
Another way of looking at this is to stop thinking of obesity as something we’re all experiencing because we’re all drinking and consuming too many bad things equally.
For instance, a recent study (Bremer et al.), which disaggregated soda consumption among teenagers between 1984 and 2004, found that a fifth of male teens were, in effect, super-consumers. They accounted for all the increased soda consumption over that time period, with some kids admitting to drinking about 16 cans of soda a day.
The most careful tax models pretty much show that increasing soda taxes won’t produce much weight loss in these high consumers of soda (because they’re consuming so much of the stuff that taxes will hardly make a dent in their intake) or, for that matter, medium or low consumers (because they aren’t consuming enough of the stuff for any reduction in soda consumption to make much difference). Plus, there’s research to show that super consumers are the most resistant to taxes.
But, in the end, arguments about math and modeling are beside the point. It’s the rhetoric that is the most damaging, and this is something I can only explain from experience. My father was a security guard and my mother was a waitress. I grew up in a solidly blue-collar neighborhood that stood cheek-by-jowl with one of the most disastrous public-housing projects in Ireland — the one U2 sang about in “Running to Stand Still”: “I see seven towers, but I only see one way out” (that would be heroin).
When you live in this kind of neighborhood, it’s hard to convey the effect of middle class academics and journalists telling you that you aren’t fit to be a parent because you let your kids get fat, and that you need to pay a lot more taxes on the food that you’ve eaten all your life — and from which you derive considerable pleasure.
It doesn’t matter that this isn’t what the great and good “really” mean, because when something sounds like class warfare, the first response is to kill the messenger, even if that messenger is trying to stop you from killing yourself.
Anyone who is on the medical frontlines of childhood obesity deserves a break, given the horror stories they’ve seen, but Ludwig and Murtagh’s failure to anticipate how their message would come across is baffling. Ludwig has subsequently deplored the way the media “wildly” exaggerated their paper, but their conclusions were hardly ambiguous: “State intervention may serve the best interests of many children with life-threatening obesity, comprising the only realistic way to control harmful behaviors.” The rhetorical fact is that they did not write their piece to make the caveats sound more persuasive than the proposal.
Perhaps the academic medical establishment needs to employ the modern equivalent of court jesters, to point out when academics sound like cranks or cuckoos — before the media performs the same function.
The second incident involves the idea that we can tax away the sin of obesity. As I’ve noted in this column before, the U.S. media loves soda taxes. Overwhelmingly, news reporting and editorializing between 2008 and 2010 described them as a brilliant prescription for reducing obesity, in effect quoting only those academics who advocate for them.
The latest outing of these ideas comes from the New York Times’ Mark Bittman, who has supersized the core idea of soda taxation to include taxing everything that’s not good for us. And once again, the public is treated to a masterpiece of selective reporting.
“A 20 percent increase in the price of sugary drinks nationally could result in about a 20 percent decrease in consumption, which in the next decade could prevent 1.5 million Americans from becoming obese and 400,000 cases of diabetes, saving about $30 billion. It’s fun — inspiring, even — to think about implementing a program like this,” writes Bittman.
But dear, sweet Mr. Bittman, it’s only “fun” and “inspiring” when you ignore the math that produces this wonderland. If you look at the entire body of taxation and nutrition literature — the work that you and your journalism colleagues magically fail to find whenever you write about this topic — Alice pretty much stays fat.
Indeed, as one well-designed study (Ebbeling et al.) found after replacing sugared drinks in teens for six months with non-sugared drinks, a switch that achieved an 82 percent reduction in soda consumption, there was no statistically significant change in the teens’ weight overall. It was only among a subset of kids, who were overweight to begin with and who were high soda consumers, that there was any significant weight loss.
Another way of looking at this is to stop thinking of obesity as something we’re all experiencing because we’re all drinking and consuming too many bad things equally.
For instance, a recent study (Bremer et al.), which disaggregated soda consumption among teenagers between 1984 and 2004, found that a fifth of male teens were, in effect, super-consumers. They accounted for all the increased soda consumption over that time period, with some kids admitting to drinking about 16 cans of soda a day.
The most careful tax models pretty much show that increasing soda taxes won’t produce much weight loss in these high consumers of soda (because they’re consuming so much of the stuff that taxes will hardly make a dent in their intake) or, for that matter, medium or low consumers (because they aren’t consuming enough of the stuff for any reduction in soda consumption to make much difference). Plus, there’s research to show that super consumers are the most resistant to taxes.
But, in the end, arguments about math and modeling are beside the point. It’s the rhetoric that is the most damaging, and this is something I can only explain from experience. My father was a security guard and my mother was a waitress. I grew up in a solidly blue-collar neighborhood that stood cheek-by-jowl with one of the most disastrous public-housing projects in Ireland — the one U2 sang about in “Running to Stand Still”: “I see seven towers, but I only see one way out” (that would be heroin).
When you live in this kind of neighborhood, it’s hard to convey the effect of middle class academics and journalists telling you that you aren’t fit to be a parent because you let your kids get fat, and that you need to pay a lot more taxes on the food that you’ve eaten all your life — and from which you derive considerable pleasure.
It doesn’t matter that this isn’t what the great and good “really” mean, because when something sounds like class warfare, the first response is to kill the messenger, even if that messenger is trying to stop you from killing yourself.
