FASCIST OBESITY

Let’s hope Medicare slipped in its ruling on July 15 that obesity will now be looked upon as a government-recognized illness while George Bush’s attention was distracted elsewhere (like dealing with the latest Al Qaeda threats) – so that GW will squash it before it goes into effect. Such a ruling is true fascism at work.

Such rulings would be expected under a Kerry-Edwards Trial Lawyer Presidency, giving trial lawyers carte blanche to sue any number of food providers. But it’s fascism in any presidency. Fascism is characterized not by government ownership of industries (that’s socialism), but stifling over-regulation of industries – and with the collusion of the regulated industries for the purpose of throttling competition from upstarts.

The perfect case of such fascist collusion is between the FDA and the big pharmaceutical companies. The FDA conducts an unending war upon dietary supplements because they are so much cheaper than pharmaceutical alternatives.

Here’s an example. Ever so often, a batch of hamburger makes folks sick from E.coli infection and the FDA shuts down its producer for a while – but it doesn’t order all hamburger in America taken off the market in perpetuity. Yet that’s what the FDA did with tryptophan, an amino acid (constituent of protein) supplement used by millions with no ill effect to increase serotonin production in their brains (that’s the stuff that makes you feel calm and less-stressed-out). One batch of tryptophan by one manufacturer had a contaminant that killed three dozen people in 1989-90. No one of the millions of others taking tryptophan from other sources ever got sick – the Centers for Disease Control traced the whole outbreak to this one bad batch — yet the FDA banned tryptophan for sale throughout the country and has kept the ban in place ever since.

Why? To make the market safe for Prozac sales. Tryptophan cost pennies. Prozac cost dollars. The FDA’s ban on tryptophan and Newsweek’s laudatory cover story on Prozac came within four days of each other in March of 1990. (Both tryptophan and Prozac enhance serotonin – the former by replacing it, the latter by prolonging it.)

Now we see the same with the FDA’s ban on ephedra, the herbal weight-loss supplement, in order to make the market safe for sales of pharmaceutical drugs like Meridia (sibutramine). Both ephedra and sibutramine increase thermogenesis — the conversion of calories into body heat rather than fat cells. An effective dose of ephedra is about 30 cents – and $4 for Meridia. (The rationale for the ephedra ban was folks overdosing on ephedra capsules. It is still available in the form of a Chinese tea called Ma Huang.)

Here’s the truth about obesity: about the only thing harder to control than obesity is terminal cancer. That’s because there are dozens and dozensof genetic programs and feedback mechanisms hardwired into us by evolution to prevent us from becoming anorexic and not eating when food is abundant.

Note that the only folks you ever see into anorexia are teen-agers. The older you get, the more you are programmed to gain fat as a genetic starvation-preventative: men on their stomachs, women on their hips. And “old” as far as our still-paleolithic genes are concerned is the other side of 30. For all but the last second of evolutionary time, humans were grandparents with one foot in their graves by their early 30s.

Thus diets don’t work and folks are continually chasing after the latest diet fad, because with the unlimited amount of cheap food available in our society, each of us has an entire network of genetic programs adding fat to our bloated bodies. One single diet never works for everyone – only for some with the genes especially responsive to it.

An effective obesity medication would have to be a complex combination of drugs, an obesity cocktail, blocking as wide a range as possible of fat-adding feedback loops. The FDA hates this, demanding lengthy tests for each constituent of the combination and then separate tests for all the various interactions between them. The approval costs would be in the billions of dollars per obesity cocktail.

The only rescue from obesity on the horizon is not from the FDA but from genetically-engineered (GE) foods. It won’t be long, for example, until we have a low-carb/high-fiber GE potato. Or how about a GE steak, as healthy as salmon because the cattle have a gene that converts the saturated fat into cholesterol-lowering Omega-3 fats?

Scientists have also discovered the gene (one single gene) that controls 80% of beef tenderness. 20% of US cattle currently have the gene, and now they’ll be bred so 100% will. You’ll soon have a steak as tender and fat-marbled as you want, that lowers your cholesterol and drives PETA animal-rights activists crazy. You can’t beat that combo!

As we wait for these scientific developments, however, the first order of business is to persuade GW to rescind Medicare’s obesity-as-illness ruling. If he wants to do this in stages, where to begin is replacing the lunatic way Medicare determines obesity.

How lunatic? According to Medicare, Arnold Schwarzenegger – in his prime as Mr. Olympia – is obese. This is done with what has to be the stupidest way ever conceived to determine “overweight” – the Body Mass Index (BMI). It’s the simple ratio between your height and weight. A 300-pound steel-muscled lineman for the Washington Redskins is just as obese, according to the BMI, as that 300-pound blob of fat and hate named Michael Moore (whom Ralph Nader has called a grotesque “human balloon”).

George W. Bush is the most physically fit President in US history. He can bench press his own weight more times than Arnold Schwarzenegger and has the same resting heart rate as a champion marathoner (44 beats-per-minute). He knows full well that the way to measure overweight is via one’s body fat percentage. The higher the percentage, the fatter you are, the lower the percentage, the thinner you are – overall weight and height are irrelevant. GW’s is around 12%, astoundingly good – and yes, the BMI would call him overweight.

The Medicare obesity-as-illness ruling provides an excellent opportunity for President Bush to renew his call for a Responsibility Society. Obesity is a personal responsibility and burden, not the government’s. The President can tell Americans that help is on the way – not from government but from fat-reducing GE food created by capitalist science. As for me, I can hardly wait for a 16oz Omega-3 New York strip – medium rare.

[Note: Acute readers will have noticed that I somehow managed to write an entire essay on obesity without once mentioning the dreaded word exercise. For those wishing that I had, my To Your Health (TTP, January 1, 2004) outlining my own exercise and nutritional program, is now posted in Classics.]