[sjf911]

An employee came to me the other day looking for ideas for a graduate class he was taking. The question was given the severe impact of the rising obesity epidemic on individual health and societal healthcare expenditures, what community based interventions would potentially be effective given the abject failure of individual interventions?

My perspective of the epidemic having grownup before it manifested is that it is predominantly related to the rapid growth in availability of and our increasing dependence on highly processed cheap "convenience" foods. Foods that are specifically engineered to maximally appeal to the eating reward center in our brain such that they induce unintentional overconsumption. Simultaneously, we have been subjected to an intense advertising campaign by the food industry over the last 50+ years that has had the (? unintentional) the effect of normalizing their role in our lives as well as creating a reward culture.
So based on my views, if we really valued collective health of our society, my recommendations would start with:

1. Root out and eliminate all forms of direct and indirect government subsidies that benefit the processed food industry.
2. Ban all convenience food advertising especially those that target children/teens
3. Start with the removal of all snack food vending machines from schools and other venues readily accessible by children with the goal of banning them entirely.
4. Place a healthcare tax on all associated foods with the goal of raising enough money to offset cost to society.

I realize that this impinges on personal choice and potentially even freedom of speech and there are plenty of people that can actually tolerate and remain relatively healthy in the current culture but we do have some experience with tobacco. There is also the argument over what is a healthy versus unhealthy food.