Are anti-obesity activists taking aim at the food industry?

Sadly, many American citizens and people all over the world are suffering from obesity. As you might have heard before, obesity will make your insurance bills much higher because you will now have a greater chance of dying. Obesity is a terrible disease to live with and is very hard to fight back.

However, is it really right for anti-obesity activists to blame the diseases on fast food restaurants instead of the responsibility for people themselves? They say that fast food restaurants “should be held accountable” for the eating habits of their customers. They also propose tobacco-style litigation against the food industry.

“An increasingly less hypothetical lawsuit that could change the way the U.S. eats has taken place. Hungry lawyers are eyeing food, considering legal action against everyone from fast-food chains to the nation’s leading fast food companies”, claimed Fox News.

The tactics used successfully against the tobacco industry and less successfully against gun manufacturers, could be turned against the food industry, says John Banzhaf, a lawyer and executive director of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH). As a matter of fact, ASH paid Banzhaf $175,000 for his promotion of “lawsuit kits” for anti-tobacco suits.

In the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), the tobacco parallel comes up again with Margo Wootan. “Poor diet and a lack of activity kill as many people as tobacco, but people don’t think about it as being as deadly as tobacco,” claims Wootan. Every can of soda sold must have a tax for the CSPI.

This issue has become so serious that the National Health Service (NHS) is already distributing drugs to control the over-eating habits of many obese citizens.

Jacob Sullum of Reason Magazine wrote, “Since L.A. already has a law against littering, and tobacco smoke in the open air hardly seems like a pressing environmental concern, it seems City Councilwoman Jen Perry is interested in banning smoking only because she dislikes it. She herself says, ‘When kids see adults   smoking in a family-friendly place like a park, it normalizes smoking and causes it to be approved behavior.’”

Miss Manners columnist, Judith Martin claims, “It is being said that illnesses caused or exacerbated by obesity may soon constitute the chief cause of preventable deaths, overtaking the current scourge, which is tobacco. Then came the plague, not just of smoking scofflaws, but of righteous busybodies. Newly empowered with public support, nonsmokers started polluting the atmosphere with unsolicited and insulting health care. Nor have they been intimidated from doing this in regard to the eating habits of those whom they deem to be overweight.”