Making Criminals of Overweight Children

I think we’d all agree that kids have tough choices to make at every turn, and this includes what they eat and drink.  A thick, sloppy sandwich served with fries and a sugary soda, or a salad of mixed greens and vegetables from every color of the rainbow with a side of vinaigrette.  Yeah, I get it.

But c’mon, does anyone really think that creating junk food laws for kids is going to help?

Neither the original nor the abstract of this research article, published in the August 13 journal “Pediatrics,” is available online. When it is, there is likely to be a fee.  So I will depend on the most reliable review I can find, although it will be imperfect.  But the above citation from our local news source is actually fairly typical of how the nation is covering the story.  As far as I can figure, Dr. Daniel Taber — a post-doctoral researcher at University of Illinois Chicago — decided to look at various ways of measuring kids as a function of “competitive food laws.”  Or, laws that limit the availability of foods to kids. Looking at 40 states and over 6000 kids is impressive.  But my research-minded self has to wonder what the hell he is measuring and what the hell he is finding. He is measuring kids’ “BMI” or “body mass index.”  This is a derivative measurement that might be a decent predictor of pathology, but virtually impossible to understand in terms of everyday reality or common sense. One clever interviewer asked that this be translated into terms we could relate to — pounds.  Taber responded that, roughly, it would be 1.25 fewer pounds for a 5-foot-tall child who started out at 100 pounds in 2003.  “That was just an average, so many students gained less and some gained more,” he noted. Nobody in the news networks or anyone else I can find picked up on the potentially overwhelming insignificance of this study. It reminds me of something a clinical supervisor pointed out to me when I was a medical student at Beauvais in France. He was noting the significance of the dichotomy between research and practice. When he said “town and gown” he was referring to the limited ability to extrapolate from research data to clinical practice.  Like how drugs used on clinical research in women and children had never been tested in women and children, a situation which is a little better now but not very much. But wait, there’s more. The thing we are studying is how “competitive laws” for food work.  Apparently forty or so states already have them — laws which restrict children’s access to “fast” or “junk” foods.  We are studying them over a very limited period of time. But of course, they don’t work.  Laws — or even suggestions — of limiting access to anything do not work.  Certainly not at a governmental level and not on a national level, either.

I’m sure even those not old enough to remember prohibition have heard of it.  Or maybe have seen the “Boardwalk Empire” television series, starring Steve Buscemi.  Prohibition is a time when people sided with gangsters.  They learned to love those adorable law-breakers who took risks to bring people simple visceral pleasures like getting drunk. If I told someone to go on a diet where they could eat anything in the world except German chocolate cake, they would likely crave German chocolate cake before I finished the end of the sentence. Or I could say “think of anything in the world except a blue horse.”  My next question would have to be “Is the horse powder blue or royal blue?”  In her highly reflective and academic book The Case Against Lawyers, Catherine Crier attacks the U.S. legal system for having too many laws which even the people who enforce them can’t understand.  The underlying belief is that you can fix things by making more laws and more rules.  However, the true consequence of such a belief is to inspire people to get around the laws. This is an ideal which – and this can’t be a coincidence — males seem to worship, whether in the military or in sports or in business.  The ideal of how much can we get away with without being caught. When I think of the kids in the “competitive laws” study and the 1.25 gained pounds over a few years, I have only one focus. What happens after the study?  I give the kids not over six months to create a black-market, underground kind of junk food network. Whether it has a sweet or salty taste, junk food is created to “sell.”  This is based on a capitalistic model which has played into what is essentially an addiction.  In the big picture, this is the truth.

I am not blaming Dr. Taber, or any other academic researcher.  I have been there — at least for a little while.  The ideal of the double-blind placebo controlled study came to us from Avicenna, a Persian researcher who developed it in the second century.  I don’t know how much relevance it could have had to research then.  It is certain, however, that modern society is more complex now than ever.  Peer groups, the rapidity of information travel, the sheer size and mixing of populations and their influences — there is a lot of going on with a lot of different factors. One thing is as certain as the sun rising in the morning.  Obesity is a multi-factorial problem.  There are biochemical and neurochemical factors, as well as psychosocial ones.  I have actually tried to draft “psycho-dynamic formulations” — or on-paper classifications — of the factors that make somebody obese.  The best I’ve done is run out of paper.  From social and commercial chastising of the obese, to the symbolic “protections” by a layer of fat from the potentially destructive attentions of men, to depression with feelings of “emptiness,” to feelings of family or group belonging from sharing expression by obesity — the list is endless. Trying to solve a problem like this with laws and rules is somewhere on the continuum between naiveté and an intellectual isolation that is possible only within the world of academics.  When studied as indicated in the sources above, it can only serve to create fodder for the news media. And it’s as simple as just that.  It is not expected to actually solve a problem, and certainly not this one. Should laws and rules be the preferred way to intervene, the most appropriate level would be that of looking at the additives that make foods addictive.  This actually may be defined to include added refined sugar in food manufacture.  On this level, I do not expect aggressive study, let alone laws.  We would be flying in the face of the corporations and their money making agenda which has become larger than humans and their rights and their well-being.

But creating junk food laws for kids?  I don’t think so.