Unhealthy Food

Unhealthy Food There are multiple issues at the heart of the idea that there should be bans on junk food. The surface-level issue is that there is a point at which our free will is being corrupted by external interests, and that government as another external interest can act to counter these influences. The other major underlying issue is actually public health.

This paper will examine each of these major issues at the heart of the argument and then examine the strength of the arguments in favor and against such food bands. The individual free will argument is used by both sides. Opponents of these bans have argued that individuals have the right to make their own determinations. Surowiecki (2012) counters that people do not have a fixed definition of what they want, but rather rely on contextual clues to determine optimal consumption.

These cues are typically manipulated by those in the junk food industry to drive higher consumption, since the raison d'etre of those firms is to increase profits. Thus, we have only a veneer of individual free will; the reality is that our concept of free will is frequently manipulated. This leads to the nanny state argument -- that government has recognized this behavior on the part of business and believes it is in the unique position of changing this behavior.

By limiting choices, it is protecting people from their own poor decision-making; rather, it is protecting people from having their free will manipulated. This line of reasoning can become quite complex the more philosophical it gets, which leads to a wide range of arguments about free will, the role of individual decision-making in American society and as a contrast to that the role that government should play in influencing individual decision-making.

The argument essentially weighs the ethics of reducing one's individual freedom against the benefits of limiting one's fast food options (Mehta, 2007). Ultimately, the debate about individual will comes down to making a judgment call about what is better in society. Either the individual's right to make his or her own decisions is paramount or the government has a right to help shape better decision-making.

When the argument is about children, as Bittman points out, there is less cope for the free will argument to be used as a defense against such laws. Children are generally believed to have lower powers to exercise their free will, and therefore are even more in need of protection than adults. Even if adults want to allow themselves to be duped by marketers, children should be afforded such protection by society, via government regulation.

There may even be an inherent superiority embedded in the pro-legislation individual will argument, in that some people are savvy enough to know how marketers seek to influence consumer decision-making, but most people are not as savvy. The role of those who know is to protect those who do not.

This is similar to the argument in favor of protecting children, but when it is framed as adults who are in need of protection, people can become quite defensive out the implication that they might be as need of protection as children because their decision-making processes are no better. There are alternatives, such as self-regulation, but studies have shown that self-regulation has been ineffective (Bernhardt, et al., 2013). The other major issue is actually public health.

This is not necessarily a moral issue where the general benefit of having a healthy public is being weighed against the need to preserve individual free will. It may simply be pragmatic, as was the case with the various bans on cigarette marketing and consumption. Governments, like the one Bloomberg runs, pay a significant portion of their expenses to health insurance, and to cover the health care needs of the underprivileged in their societies. There is significant motivation, therefore, to reduce this cost burden.

Obesity and related ailments like heart disease and diabetes are contributing factors to the costs that governments face, so governments have incentive to reduce obesity levels in society. There may be nothing altruistic at all about the drive to improve the health of people in New York or anywhere else, but simply a drive to reduce some of the unnecessary costs associated with providing a broad range of health care services.

At the very least, the move seeks to make those who are responsible for those costs -- the food marketers -- bear some of the cost rather than have those health care costs exist as externalities for which the food marketers never have to pay. A ban such as Bloomberg's on sugary drinks is a drop in the bucket compared with the overall issues afflicting the health of Americans.

It is an effective way of helping people with their health, but is a tool that is only effective in conjunction with other tools, and carries with it fairly significant consequences for the balance in American society between individual freedoms and government intervention. Changing behavior is slow, and it may be difficult for such a ban to change the overall behavior patterns (overconsumption, inattentive eating, lack of exercise, etc.) that lead to the public health problems Bloomberg wants to address.

Melnick (2010) notes that many factors contribute to this issue, and the availability of specific serving sizes of specific products is not going to solve too many of these issues. That said, the question of "should what we consume be under government supervision" is an intellectually dishonest question. At no point does anything that is being proposed constitute government supervision. Nobody in government will ever have any way of knowing what you bought or consumed, ever.

It is this type of dishonest framing that makes it impossible to have intelligent debate in this country about these types of issues. At the end of the day, greater levels of education are more important than greater levels of government intervention. Most people never take a marketing course, or an economics course, or a course on personal health and nutrition. If people are making poor decisions, it is because they do not have the tools with which to make better decisions.

If government wants to improve education and start teaching things that are useful in life, that would be better than infringing upon the individual decision-making ability of grown adults. Children might be another matter, but even with children it is adults who make the final purchase decision and provide the money to do so. If governments are concerned with lowering health care costs, government could also examine the manner in another way.

Smokers are routinely discriminated against by just about every health insurance plan, and surely the bright actuarial minds can find a way to discriminate against those whose obesity-based ailments are self-inflicted. If people are truly going to make smarter choices, it will not come because government told them to, but because they have better.