Monday, May 7, 2012

Managing Obesity

As the NY Times states today in an editorial:

Some experts suggest that young patients at risk of diabetes need to be detected earlier and treated more aggressively. But the long-term goal should be prevention of obesity and of diabetes. 

Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are bent on dismantling health care reforms that could greatly assist in curbing the obesity epidemic. The Republican-dominated House last month narrowly passed a bill that would eliminate the Prevention and Public Health Fund, established under the reform law, in part to pay for lowering the interest rate on subsidized student loans for a year. 

This is one of the most blatant distortions of physical reality that in my opinion I have ever read. There is no reform needed. Kids eat too much and the parents are solely at fault. It is merely of input less output equals net accumulation. 

1. Department of Agriculture guidelines and Federal demands make it easy for kids to bulk up. 

2. Kids are kept from walking anywhere, buses and other forms of reduced exercise are crowding out any form of exercise.

3. There is no penalty for being fat. Drugs do NOT solve anything, is it akin to putting a patch on a melanoma, out of sight out of mind, yeah!, until it mets to the brain.

Treatment is simple and zero cost. Weigh the little fatsos and then send a bill home to mom and dad, if there is one around!

Why in God's name blame the Republicans for not funding another Government program. That is not the solution to the problem. We clearly know the problem, and the solution, and the price is better than free.

The issue is not that there is another victim to be saved. It is that Government has become a co-conspirator in the process. Cigarettes  were managed by taxing them out of existence, and making a social stigma to those who smoked. Today a pack of Cigarettes is so expensive that it exceeds gasoline. And lung cancer deaths related to smoking have begun to drop accordingly. Imagine what would happen if we taxed carbs. This is a classic case of a positive Pigou tax, albeit one even the Romney camp's advisers eschew.

Carbohydrates create masses of free radicals in the body, eat a candy bar, especially one of the large ones sold and you have an explosion of the free radicals. Then what, they continue to explode in the body, damaging everything in their path, including DNA. Metformin and insulin do not solve this problem. Only positive economic punishment does.