Free-Market Solutions for Overweight Americans

Posted by gyrovague on April 7, 2011 · Comments Off on Free-Market Solutions for Overweight Americans 

By MATT RIDLEY

Leo Acadia

Sometimes we find it easy to identify a problem and impossible to think of a solution. Obesity is a good example. Almost everybody agrees that it is a growing burden on health systems and that it requires urgent attention from policy makers. But almost everybody also agrees that no policy for reducing obesity is working.

Some 32% of adult American men and 35% of women are clinically obese. The proportion hasn’t swelled in recent years, but it hasn’t shrunk either, a study of 2008 data suggests. School posters, virally marketed videos, healthy-eating classes, mandatory swimming lessons, minimum school-recess times, celebrity chefs in charge of school-meal recipes, bicycle lanes, junk-food ad bans, calorie-content labels, hectoring physicians, birthday-cake bans, monetary rewards for weight loss—they’ve all been tried, and they’ve all largely failed.

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Filed under Health, Lifestyles