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by RichardFord
4323 days ago
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I have a feeling the only thing that will stop the obesity epidemic is heavy food regulation which people will fight tooth and nail against People rightfully should fight against that heavy regulation. You don't want to go down that road. Whatever unhealthy dietary choices that people are making is a much better alternative to government regulating people's diet. Think about it for a while. |
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All of these regulations aren't in place just because officious bureaucrats wanted to clog up the smooth workings of a free, capitalist society, they exist because historically, when they weren't, people died. For proof, go and read about some of the nightclub and theatre fires that happened a hundred years ago, in which hundreds of people burned to death.
When there's a immediate link between malfeasance and harm, it's easy to see that the government should step in, introducing building codes and hygiene standards to ensure it can't happen again. When the harm is delayed, the link feels more tenuous, even if it's really not. Companies that pollute are contributing to potentially catastrophic disruption of the biosphere and global warming, but it doesn't happen overnight, so people treat it as less wrong than building a nightclub with no fire exits. It isn't.
Likewise, food companies who aggressively promote nutritionally dangerous foodstuffs cereals at children, while promoting them as healthy, are doing harm. They're doing it knowingly, and they're paying to distort scientific and political processes in order to keep doing it.
It's easy to trumpet individual choice as all important, but reality is not an individualist pipe dream. The average person is not well informed about dietary science and never will be, and many children cannot make a choice at all, let alone an informed one. In the face of the wealth and marketing power of large food companies, people have no chance on their own, and they levels of obesity in modern societies are clear proof of that.
Food regulation isn't about the government telling people what they can eat. It's about the government telling food companies that they can't produce food that's dangerous, in the long term as well as the short term. Just like the government tells companies they can't produce cars that fly apart on the highway, or buildings that fall down in a strong wind.
Regulation of dangerous business practices is exactly what government should be doing it. It's the reason why all the other nonsense governments do is worth putting up with. It protects people from irresponsible companies, and it protects responsible companies from being undercut by irresponsible companies.