The food police

Get the big, bad government out of my big, fat life. Not much chance of that, if first lady Michelle Obama has her way. She wants Washington to take an even bigger role in freeing parents from that pesky job of being responsible for their children's food:

In this op-ed in the Washington Post, the first lady pushes for congressional passage of the Child Nutrition Act, a bill that would not only increase funding for the already-wasteful and badly managed school-lunch program but relax eligibility requirements so that more children can be enrolled. It's clear that Michelle Obama, like her husband, sees government as the great fixer. In this case, the fix is simple: The more often a child eats a government-provided meal, the healthier he or she will be.

But the first lady isn't considering a lot of newer research on childhood obesity. Just a few months ago, Ohio State University released a major study that found that children are at a lower risk for obesity if they observe three easy rules: eat dinner with their families, get adequate sleep at night, and watch less television. All of these activities fall under the control of parents — not schools, and not government.

Nor is Mrs. Obama considering her own experience: When publicly discussing her own daughters' weight issues, she has repeatedly said that it was her intervention that turned the problem around. It wasn't a healthy school-provided lunch, a physical-education program, or gardening lessons.

Here's an op-ed that Mrs. Obama the op-ed writer should take a glance at. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Judge Richard Posner and the University of Chicago's Tomas Phillipson suggest the not-very-startling proposition that our high rates of obesity have resulted from agricultural innovations that have caused the price of food and thus calories to trend downward and by technological advances that have reduced the amount of physical exertion involved in work. More calories plus less activity equals obesity. Simple.

They're not very reassuring about how to change this, unless there's an anti-obesity drug or other medical interventions on the horizon, because "food is unlikely to become relatively more costly or work more stsrenuous." And:

Government programs aimed at reducing obesity have had limited success. They emphasize educating people in the dangers of obesity and in means of avoiding it. But knowledge of proper diet and the importance of exercise has risen together with weight, indicating that lack of knowledge is not the major cause of obesity—it's the lack of strong enough incentives. The private market offers an abundance of weight-management programs, but their long-run effects on weight are small and public programs are unlikely to do better.

Taxing fattening foods has its advocates, but they tend to overlook the fact that consumers can overeat otherwise healthy foods, and that taxes are regressive because they raise the food budget of poor individuals who do not overeat. It would be desirable, but infeasible, to tax just overconsumption of food.

So push away from the table and get off the couch. That's the only real solution, and the government can't do it for you.