living large in america

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/the-economics-of-obesity-a-qa-with-the-author-of-the-fattening-of-america/

I argued some time ago that farm subsidies were being misaligned with the costs of public health. While we do have other uses for corn now with energy concerns, I fail to see that we must subsidize it to the detriment of other crops with less caloric value. In fact it seemed to me that the people who should be getting farm subsidies were local produce growers, and not agri-business firms or the city dweller who happens to run a farm off in the boonies but never works on it himself (there is a tax break for this which is why it happens).

Why should fresh vegetables or fruit (and these are important because so few Americans eat them in sufficient quantity) cost so much per calorie compared with French fries and hamburgers? I enjoy them both at turns, but I freely choose to find myself eating the former because I can afford to. As the article's comments point out, grocers in poor neighborhoods are scarce and less frequented. A poor person working long hours to support a family has no incentive to come home and prepare a fresh, home-cooked meal, or even a portion therein. There's no time and energy left for this. Something can be done about this.

I'd agree that we should expect a population to grow laterally with the cheap availability of rich foods and technology which greatly eases our level of activity required to accomplish basic tasks. Riding a horse is considerable exercise in comparison to operating a car, to say nothing of merely sitting in one. Playing a video game (even a Wii or DDR) is much less impact, particularly with air conditioning, than playing in a park on a summer day. I can't argue that one is better automatically than the other. There are costs and consequences to strenuous exercise or deliberate diet cuts. Vegetarians must alter their diets to find certain deficient vitamins for example. But what we could be doing is balancing the costs such that it becomes a fair choice, at least in the arena of diet, and make nods to procure more active lifestyles when it might seem necessary to aid public health.

Fortunately there appear to be movements in the free market to do this anyway. Company health plans are offering bounties to people who join health clubs and start working out regularly or who start a diet, quit smoking, etc. Other companies are simply building gyms and clinics on site to give employees greater access to exercise and health care/advice. If the government simply takes off the gloves on the subsidies and gives us greater incentives to consume locally grown or produced foods (regardless of whether they're healthier or not), we as a society can mitigate some of these problems brought on by the ease from which we live today. I'm not totally convinced now that they'd have to go all the way and create penalties in the form of new taxes on unhealthier choices but that effort has reaped substantial benefits on smoking rates -- (http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/offshoring-lung-cancer/).
So it might not hurt as much as we'd like to think.