Mark Meckler: The American obesity crisis is getting out of hand

The following was written by Mark Meckler and originally published on The Washington Times. Click here to read the entire article there!

James O. Hill, a researcher who has studied obesity for more than four decades, earning him the unenviable title of “one of the world’s foremost experts in obesity,” has watched the storm set in since the 1980s.

“If obesity is left unchecked, almost all Americans will be overweight by 2050,” he told The Associated Press. That was in 2003. The problem has only gotten worse since then.

Americans live in a catch-22 about their health. Around 75% of adults in the United States are overweight. As of 2020, 2 in 5 were obese, and more than 22 million were severely obese. Yet we pretend this deadly health crisis does not exist because talking about weight is considered rude, insensitive and “fatphobic.” This means we cannot seriously or honestly address why Americans are so unhealthy.

Talk about it or not, though, there’s no denying the problem of obesity. Frankly, it’s embarrassing. Americans have become some of the fattest people in the world. But rather than attack that problem, we have made excuses to justify our lack of self-discipline. “Body positivity.” “Health at all sizes.” “Positive self-image.” These aren’t the terms of an in-shape, healthy society. They’re the terms of a society reeling from bad decisions and beer-bellied bodies to pay for it.

Once we are able to admit that, we can begin to look at why Americans are so out of shape. Obviously, a lack of exercise plays a major part. But the biggest problem appears to be that we are filling our bodies with garbage — garbage masquerading as food.

The federal government oversees our food supply, so it’s not surprising that its management often — or perhaps intentionally — misses the mark. For example, at the same time that the U.S. continues to sell ultra-processed foods that are banned in other countries (Mountain Dew, Cheez-Its, Skittles, Pop-Tarts, etc.), the government also restricts our access to healthier options, including raw milk, meat and even supplements.

In addition, government subsidies encourage farmers to grow more food than necessary, causing the number of calories available per capita in America to skyrocket over a 30-year period. In 2019, for example, per capita calories available for consumption in the U.S. neared 4,000 per person per day, whereas the world rate averaged less than 3,000. In response, food companies have saturated the market with more food options (many of which use heavily subsidized ingredients, including soybeans, wheat and corn) than ever.

Interestingly, the government does not heavily subsidize vegetable or fruit crops. Corn crops, by contrast, received $2,198,824,000 in government subsidies in 2016 alone. Indeed, according to one source, corn, soybeans, wheat, grain sorghum, barley, oats, cotton and rice “receive about 70-80 percent of all government payments” and “account for over 75 percent of total US crop exports.”

We should not be surprised that many of these ingredients appear in prevalent junk foods, including cereal, alcohol, soda, chips and fast food.

In other words, the federal government, through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is actively working to keep unhealthy foods on the market while giving farms less incentive to produce options that are more nutritious.

“The USDA was created to help the family farmer and to ensure a wholesome food supply,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pointed out at a recent campaign stop. “But its actual job is to do exactly the opposite. It is to give us poisoned, processed, addictive foods that are mass poisoning us and killing us and making us the sickest population in the world.”

Mr. Kennedy, today’s foremost critic of the medical-industrial complex, is spot-on. Theoretically, government agencies are founded to help Americans, although that’s rarely the case. In the USDA, we have a department that has abandoned its entire purpose, having become an enemy of the people’s health. It’s another sad example of the failures of a “benevolent” federal government.

We must not continue to put up with an agency that inundates our food markets with poison. We must abolish the Department of Agriculture and any other superfluous or corrupted government agency.

Through an Article 5 convention, we can cut Washington down to size and ensure that our representatives again work for the people.

For too long, we’ve neglected to take action to stave off the onset of a nationwide obesity crisis. It’s time to step up and confront it head-on.

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