Day By Day© by Chris Muir.

September 05, 2006

Obesity Pandemic?

Now obesity is being termed as pandemic (adjective 1. (of a disease) prevalent throughout an entire country, continent, or the whole world; epidemic over a large area.):

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - An obesity pandemic threatens to overwhelm health systems around the globe with illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease, experts at an international conference warned Sunday.

"This insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity is now engulfing the entire world," Paul Zimmet, chairman of the meeting of more than 2,500 experts and health officials, said in a speech opening the weeklong International Congress on Obesity. "It's as big a threat as global warming and bird flu."

Call me a cynic, but if global warming and bird flu are the yardsticks against which the obesity pandemic is being measured, I'm not too worried.

Experts at the conference said governments should impose bans on junk food advertising aimed directly at children, although they acknowledged such restrictions were unlikely to come about soon because the food industry would lobby hard against them.

When experts begin advocating bans on anything, I automatically take what they have to say with a grain of salt.

When I see little fat kids running around it really bothers me, because I know those kids are unhealthy. The real culprits here, however, are their parents. Banning advertisements for junk food during peak kiddie viewing hours is not going to stop mom or dad from buying the crap when they go to the store. I know someone, for example, who realizes that cereals like Cap'n Crunch and Froot Loops are garbage, but she tells me she likes her kids to have them. What do the experts have to say about that? Will they then suggest that shoppers have "minders" when they go to the supermarket to make sure they buy the correct foods?

Provide parents with nutritional education (through the schools is a possibility),then let them make their own decisions about what they buy. Banning ads on legal products is a fascist tactic that is not going to work. What the experts seem to forget is that we as individuals should be accountable for our own decisions.

Besides, if the experts managed to solve all of the problems they keep squawking about, they'd put themselves right ouf of employment...