LIKE THE family fissures that sometimes erupt during holiday gatherings, the "public health" community couldn't keep it together last week. Incensed by a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report that obesity was Public Enemy Number One -- killing more than 400,000 Americans each year -- the anti-tobacco lobby sprang into action. Smoking opponents just couldn't stand playing second fiddle to their anti-obesity comrades. Although both are supposed to be concerned about public health, one is just more concerned than the other. Thus, the anti-tobacco lobby forced the CDC to slim down the obesity statistics and restore smoking to its rightful place as the leading public health killer.
While the tobacco prohibitionists got to keep their "street cred" and public funding for pet programs on how to run other people's lives, the obesity police were left licking their wounds. Oh, can't we all just get along? Can't we all just stop worrying about other people and mind our own business? Can't the nattering nabobs of nosiness please just give it a rest?
Since the latter half of the last century, our society has been rolling back regulations into personal lives. From contraceptives to abortion to same-sex relationships, prudes and puritans have consistently lost to the enlightened elite. But the same liberal promoters of personal choice, who turned their noses at prying behind bedroom doors, began sticking their noses into some of the most common activities.
Today, in many cities in our alleged land of freedom, you can't even willingly walk into a bar where people smoke; smoking is not allowed -- anywhere. Bartenders, waiters and waitresses can't assume the risk of working in an environment where it's known that they will voluntarily expose themselves to second-hand smoke. Thank goodness the anti-obesity lobby is too busy fighting the anti-tobacco lobby over who's number one. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to walk into the bar and order a cheeseburger either.
The public health elite needs to put its ego on a diet and stop treating everyone as if they need protection from themselves. Originally understood as a centralized effort to prevent highly communicable diseases like smallpox and influenza, the public health movement has morphed into a lifestyle Taliban. Eating too much cholesterol or too many calories? Ten lashes of the whip for you.
The danger posed to individual autonomy by treating all of our activities as public health issues is not limited to smoking or eating too much. Because there is no principled public health distinction between these activities and drinking, having sex and other activities that college students like to engage in, there is no telling where the fickle public health fiends will strike next.
Many alarmists justify the current anti-obesity crusade by pointing to skyrocketing health insurance costs and the rising number of Americans classified as obese. But if there is any causation between these phenomena, that is solely because we make it so. In any other line of insurance, individuals must pay premiums that are adjusted for their particular risk factors. Thus, people who buy dangerous vehicles or live in flood plains must pay more for coverage, if they are able to buy any at all.
When it comes to health insurance, however, sedentary overeaters pass the costs of their lifestyle on to the most avid health nuts. Some would object to insurance premiums based on a body mass index or physical exam as unfairly punitive against those with inherited conditions. But in many obesity cases today, we are clearly confronting matters of lifestyle. Unless the human gene pool is somehow mutating to produce more fat people, personal behavior is the only explanation for the ever-greater percentage of the population that is obese.
Even if the obesity epidemic were a genetic problem, it would still not be unfair to charge a premium for this risk factor. After all, there are plenty of other immutable characteristics that force us to pay more, such as being male in the case of car insurance, or being old or predisposed to a disease in the case of life insurance.
Putting aside the problem of external costs, which is easily resolved if only we had the political will, there is no principled reason for treating obesity any differently than any other lifestyle choice. An individual's body weight is nobody's business but his own, and the public health busybodies should butt out.
Eric Wang's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at ewang@cavalierdaily.com.
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