RALEIGH – North Carolina officials like to trumpet anything that makes the state look good and bury things that make us look bad. Here’s hoping they don’t yield to the temptation to celebrate a recent grade of B for North Carolina’s efforts to combat obesity – because the sources of the grade don’t strike me as particularly credible.
Zoltan Arcs and Kenneth Stanton, professors at the University of Baltimore, are the co-authors of an annual report examining both the extent of the problem of overweight and obese people in the various states as well as public-policy responses to the issue. In their most recent report, released earlier this week, Arcs and Stanton place North Carolina among a group of only 11 states receiving a B for their anti-obesity policies (no state received an A).
I’m not pro-obesity, of course, Neither am I in need of rationalizations to defend my own weight, as I am given to understand by colleagues that I am suspiciously underweight and need to be eating more Hardee’s and Frito-Lay products. But a major red flag goes up when I read that Arcs and Stanton believe most Americans are overweight and about third are obese.
These numbers are almost certainly inflated, ridiculously so, based on a flawed measure that classifies top NBA athletes as obese. If healthy people are wrongly classified as overweight, and overweight people wrongly tagged as obese, then researchers are also likely to exaggerate the Medicare and Medicaid costs associated with each group, and thus misstate the public-policy implications.
More suspicion is warranted when this quote from Arcs and Stanton is considered:
“Compared to the struggle against tobacco, we’re far from having a significant impact against unhealthy weight gains,” Acs said. “The good news is that many of the lessons learned from the tobacco wars are applicable here. In the end, it likely will be a mix of legislative efforts, private-sector influence, litigation and common sense. But the logical place for it to start is in statehouses across the country.”
Apparently, they want states to do far more than encourage people to make good decisions about their health and ensure that schoolchildren have access to healthful lunches. Arcs and Stanton seem to wish that trial attorneys would sue Big Mac, as they once sued Big Tobacco, and that state legislators will enact junk-food taxes and other silliness in an attempt further to micromanage the daily lives of their fellow citizens.
It would be far more reassuring if North Carolina had gotten an F from these individuals.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.