For several months, a telehealth company, Hims & Hers, has run full-page ads about obesity in the New York Times. The ads promote the idea that obesity is a medical condition that can be eradicated only with Ozempic and other new obesity drugs. They go on to demand insurance coverage for those drugs. The Sunday, November 17, Hims & Hers ad complained that “access to effective treatment” for extreme obesity “remains out of reach for many,” unlike treatments for breast cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and HIV. “It’s time to change that,” concludes the pitch.
The Hims & Hers argument—that obesity is a genetic disorder like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, largely outside the control of its victims—may be self-interested, but it has also been the position of the public-health industry for years. We are to believe that the sharp rise of obesity in the U.S. over the last several decades is due to genetic changes in Americans’ susceptibility to weight gain. To portray obesity as something brought on by behavior—overeating and under exercising—is to blame the victim and to commit “fat-shaming.” This insistence that being overweight is outside individual control is driven in considerable part by racial considerations, since black females are disproportionately overweight. But the rule against invoking personal responsibility is also part of a larger elite mindset. By medicalizing behavioral issues, the elites transfer power from the individual to themselves, the dispensers of technocratic responses to social problems.
It is absurd, however, to claim that Americans’ genes have changed in the last half century in such a way as to make Americans gain weight. (The same fallacy applies to the equally fat Brits.) Genes takes centuries, not decades, to change. The recent alteration in the Anglosphere’s diet and lifestyle is massive and obvious, however: snacking throughout the day, a diet of highly sweetened processed foods, and a lack of exercise or even of merely walking modest distances. Members of gyms wait several minutes for the gym elevator to arrive rather than walking up one flight of stairs, even though they are presumably there to burn calories, rather than merely to take advantage the gym’s inevitable snack-food vending machines.
To make America healthy again, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promises to do, he will have to take on this conceit that obesity is newly in our genes, not in our behavior. Whether he will do so is unclear. Kennedy’s background in environmental litigation is always on display. Environmental litigation focuses obsessively on chemicals. Kennedy ties Americans’ worsening health to those chemicals. He is fixated on the dyes that make processed junk food more brilliant. He wants to get rid of the artificial coloring in Froot Loops. He wants more regulation of preservatives and pesticides.
But chemicals, like plastic bags, are our friends, responsible for far more good than harm. Chemicals are not responsible for the obesity epidemic (though preservatives do enable the phalanx of packaged snacks that surround Americans in every transportation hub and nearly every retail environment). It is also absurd to imply that American environmental agencies have been lax in their regulation of chemicals. Rather than coloring Froot Loops with “natural” dyes, as Kennedy suggests, a better course would be to persuade parents not to feed their children Froot Loops in the first place. Kennedy should make the case for home cooking—for mothers actually preparing meals for their families, rather than leaving their children to wolf down the contents of cellophane packs or to microwave frozen pizza whenever those children can tear themselves away from their screens. (Sitting down to a cooked family meal is also a means of socializing children. Feminists scorn such domestic activities as a sneaky means of diverting females from the partner track.)
Concern about children’s eating habits should not be a Democratic monopoly, mocked by conservatives. Where government has already displaced parents, such as in providing school lunches and breakfasts, it is appropriate to insist that those government-provided meals eliminate sucrose-rich processed foods in favor of fresh fruits and vegetables.
Kennedy should end food stamp subsidies for sodas and prepared food. Ideally, he would replace food stamps with food itself. If those food baskets, stocked with cheese, milk, and other staples, are scorned, as they will be, we learn something useful about the advocates decrying food insecurity and claiming that “poor” Americans lack the wherewithal to eat. (“Food insecurity” is a rebranding of “hunger” activism, since even the activists have a hard time hawking a “hunger” epidemic with a straight face in light of spiraling obesity rates.) The activists have been in league with Big Food for years, however, to preserve the “autonomy” of welfare recipients to buy junk food with taxpayer dollars.
Capitalism has been such a roaring success, and has made production so cheap, efficient, and abundant, that it has reversed the millennia-long human condition of food scarcity and famine. We now live in a wall-to-wall food environment. Pennies buy the amount of calories that peasants had to work years to accumulate. Understandably, Big Food wants us to eat as much of its products as we can stuff down our stomachs before bursting. The solution to its blandishments is not more regulation but more self-discipline. Nor are costly drugs, with their inevitable side effects, necessary to reduce obesity.
Persuading others to change their behavior is a nearly insurmountable task, however. Passing regulations is something that government officials can do, and so every problem looks like a regulatory failure to those in government. In announcing Kennedy’s nomination on Truth Social, Trump said: “Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex.” They have, but with their own full participation. No one is forcing them to buy the latest innovation in chocolate-chip, granola-filled, gluten-free, vegan, mini-mocha-snackable doughnuts.
Kennedy is a mixed bag. Admirable in his defense of free speech, especially when it came to rebutting the pseudo-expertise of the public health establishment during the Covid hysteria, eloquent in his criticism of lockdowns and masks, he nevertheless has a long history of feminized, New-Agey objections to sound medical interventions, such as vaccines and fluoridated water. Allowing parents to opt out of childhood vaccination may appeal to libertarian instincts for choice, but it also allows parents to be free riders on others’ pro-social decisions. A goal of capping drug prices, which Kennedy shares with Trump, shows a lamentable misunderstanding of the need for researchers to recoup the costs of their risky investments.
Blaming corporate or social forces for bad decisions within an individual’s control is a left-wing impulse. Americans need to hear a hard truth: they are eating themselves to death. Only they can restore their bodies to their proper shape and function.
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images