Who should decide what you can eat: you? Or the state?…
It is no coincidence that the push for more food regulation came at a time when Congress obsessed about the rising cost of medical care.
When government pays for your health care, it will inevitably be drawn into regulating your personal life. First, politicians promise to pay. Then, they propose to control you.
Where does it stop? If we must control diet to balance the government’s budget, will the health squad next ban skydiving and extramarital sex? How about another try at Prohibition?
But was about reasonable-sounding policies like forcing businesses to post calorie counts?
Often the Food Police strike an innocent pose, claiming that they just want to give people information. Information is good. But it’s not free. Mandated calorie signs in restaurants cost money. Those costs are passed on to consumers, and the endless parade of calorie counts and warning labels make us numb to more important warnings – like, “This Coffee Is Scalding Hot.”
It’s not as if dietary information isn’t already available. Health and diet websites abound. Talk shows routinely discuss the latest books on diet and nutrition. TV diet gurus are celebrities. That’s enough. We have information. We don’t need government force. (John Stossel)
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Body Mass Index Cards anyone?
“I’m sorry sir but your Body Mass Index card shows you over your limit so we can’t sell you <fill in the blank>”
🙂
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CHARLOTTE — The North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition is threatening to send a blogger to jail for recounting publicly his battle against diabetes and encouraging others to follow his lifestyle.
Chapter 90, Article 25 of the North Carolina General Statutes makes it a misdemeanor to “practice dietetics or nutrition” without a license. According to the law, “practicing” nutrition includes “assessing the nutritional needs of individuals and groups” and “providing nutrition counseling.”
Steve Cooksey has learned that the definition, at least in the eyes of the state board, is expansive.
When he was hospitalized with diabetes in February 2009, he decided to avoid the fate of his grandmother, who eventually died of the disease. He embraced the low-carb, high-protein Paleo diet, also known as the “caveman” or “hunter-gatherer” diet. The diet, he said, made him drug- and insulin-free within 30 days. By May of that year, he had lost 45 pounds and decided to start a blog about his success.
But this past January the state diatetics and nutrition board decided Cooksey’s blog — Diabetes-Warrior.net — violated state law. The nutritional advice Cooksey provides on the site amounts to “practicing nutrition,” the board’s director says, and in North Carolina that’s something you need a license to do.
Unless Cooksey completely rewrites his 3-year-old blog, he could be sued by the licensing board. If he loses the lawsuit and refuses to take down the blog, he could face up to 120 days in jail.
Regulatory overreach? I’d say so. (NRO)
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Michael Marder, an Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country in Northern Spain, made the suggestion in an editorial entitled, “If peas can talk, should we eat them?”
“Imagine a being capable of processing, remembering and sharing information — a being with potentialities proper to it and inhabiting a world of its own. Given this brief description, most of us will think of a human person, some will associate it with an animal, and virtually no one’s imagination will conjure up a plant,” he wrote.
“When it comes to a plant, it turns out to be not only a what but also a who — an agent in its milieu, with its own intrinsic value or version of the good. Inquiring into justifications for consuming vegetable beings thus re-conceived, we reach one of the final frontiers of dietary ethics.”
So when does the Pea Mass Murder/Genocide trail and lawsuit begin?
“The ‘renewable’ aspects of perennial plants may be accepted by humans as a gift of vegetal being and integrated into their diets. But it would be harder to justify the cultivation of peas and other annual plants, the entire being of which humans devote to externally imposed ends.”
In 2009, for example, an article in the New York Times written by science columnist Natalie Angier went so far as to claim that plants are the most ethical life forms on the planet, Smith said.
“But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to ‘committed vegetarians’ and ‘strong ethical vegans,’” she wrote, “we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way.”
She continued: “It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive. Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun. Don’t expect them to boast: they’re too busy fighting to survive.”
Anyone who follows thses kinds of discussions know where this eventually leads.
Radical groups like PETA, for example, don’t want humans consuming any meat whatsoever, and now, it seems, there are those who don’t want humans consuming some vegetables.
Sounds silly, but think again.
Smith notes that Switzerland has already “added a new clause to the Federal Constitution requiring that ‘account to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms.'”
A report presented by the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology explained that “living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive.”
“Thus, the panel determined that we cannot claim ‘absolute ownership’ over plants and, moreover, that ‘individual plants have an inherent worth.’ This means that ‘we may not use them just as we please, even if the plant community is not in danger, or if our actions do not endanger the species, or if we are not acting arbitrarily.’”(examiner)
Plants have rights you know! 🙂
So if the government does come after you for being fat, or for eating wrong food, now some whackos want to come after you for the simple act of eating itself you evil selfish bastard. 🙂
2004: In a decision which could have a major impact on the war against obesity, the federal government has reversed a 1987 decision, and has just ruled that health insurance companies can now discriminate against the obese as a means of encouraging them to lose weight.
More specifically, it ruled that all health insurance plans subject to federal jurisdiction may provide discounts or rebates to those who are not obese, and/or “modify copayments and deductibles” based on obesity, and that some companies could simply charge the obese more for the same insurance.
“This decision provides an important, immediate, and direct financial incentive for the obese to lose weight, and finally permits insurance companies to do what they have been hoping to do.”
“The decision could also impose true personal responsibility on those who balloon health care costs for everyone,” says <Lawyer>Banzhaf. Since each obese person averages about $1500 a year in additional health care costs, and almost one in three adults is obese, most non-obese patients are forced to pay about $500 a year more in insurance premiums each year, or to receive $500 less in benefits under our current system, he says.
This new ruling would permit any health insurance company which applied to HHS to offer premium discounts and rebates – or different copayments and deductibles – for the non-obese, provided that four simple conditions were met.
“This ruling could have more of an educational effect than all of the government’s obesity public service announcements. Every time a patient is told that his copayment or deductible is higher because he is obese, he receives a very forceful and direct reminder that his obesity has immediate consequences, and he is reminded in a health context that obesity is an important enough risk to warrant a higher rate just like smoking,” says Banzhaf. Moreover, if he still doesn’t get the message, his spouse is likely to because of the impact on the family budget, and encourage the obese individual to lose enough weight to qualify for the discount.
So I guess not everything in Liberal Land is “fair” and “equal” except the need to control people 24/7. 🙂
So when the liberals get around to it, especially if ObamaCare survives, and they manage to drive Private Health care into the ground (as was the objective of ObamaCare) leaving only the government then they can control you completely and utterly and there won’t be a thing you can do about it.
They will have the power of Life and Death, and if they tell you that you can only eat Tofu & bean spouts (though those are plants so even that may not be “morally” correct) then that’s all you’ll get because otherwise you’ll have to pay a tax for wanting something outside of the “government regulations” and then you’ll pay higher health insurance for it too.
Not that they won’t want to shut down all those choices in the first place and ban Ronald McDonald as a capitalist harbinger of doom for kids.
Think I’m going over the top?
Remember, this ruling came about under the Bush Administration.
Now you have Herrn Fuhrer Sebelius and Big Brother Obama.
How about Salt in a New York Restaurant? Cupcakes in school? Hmmm…
What do you think will happen. 😦
BMI. Folks, BMI.
Jan 2012: The American Sociological Association reports on a new study of middle school students finding that “weight gain has nothing to do with the candy, soda, chips, and other junk food they can purchase at school.” The research, which appears in Sociology of Education this month, examined almost 20,000 kids in the fifth and eighth grades. Even when snack food availability increased, the percentage of overweight or obese students decreased from fifth grade to eight grade.
“We were really surprised by that result and, in fact, we held back from publishing our study for roughly two years because we kept looking for a connection that just wasn’t there,” said the lead author of the study.
The authors found that 59.2 percent of fifth graders and 86.3 percent of eighth graders in their study attended schools that sold junk food. But, while there was a significant increase in the percentage of students who attended schools that sold junk food between fifth and eighth grades, there was no rise in the percentage of students who were overweight or obese. In fact, despite the increased availability of junk food, the percentage of students who were overweight or obese actually decreased from fifth grade to eighth grade, from 39.1 percent to 35.4 percent.
“There has been a great deal of focus in the media on how schools make a lot of money from the sale of junk food to students, and on how schools have the ability to help reduce childhood obesity,” Van Hook said. “In that light, we expected to find a definitive connection between the sale of junk food in middle schools and weight gain among children between fifth and eighth grades. But, our study suggests that—when it comes to weight issues—we need to be looking far beyond schools and, more specifically, junk food sales in schools, to make a difference.”
Maybe it’s time for the “food police” to educate themselves. All the attempts to limit choices apparently won’t do the students any good. (CCFR)
So The Food Police have to get you at Home too and what better way than through Health Insurance & ObamaCare. 🙂
Because, after all, you’re an idiot and you need the government’s “gentle hand” of “persuasion” to “do the right thing” and hand over your life and health to them.
They are, after all, better, smarter, and more “fair” than you are.
But The Examiner has a great line at the end of their article for all the Feel-Good Greenies out there: If it’s immoral to eat certain plants, how moral can it be to use them as fuel? 🙂
And Finally From the Wall Street Journal:
Large wind farms slightly increase temperatures near the ground as the turbines’ rotor blades pull down warm air, according to researchers who analyzed nine years of satellite readings around four of the world’s biggest wind farms.
The study showed for the first time that wind farms of a certain scale, while producing clean, renewable energy, do have some long-term effect on the immediate environment.
On average, the nighttime air around the wind farms became about 0.72 degree Celsius (1.3 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer over that time, compared with the surrounding area, the scientists reported Sunday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change.
“We don’t know whether there is a change in weather due to the temperature change,” said atmospheric scientist Liming Zhou at the University at Albany, who led the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation. “The temperature change is small.”
But a global change like in temperature less than that has the Global Warming Alarmist going Chicken Little beserk and wanting to control everyone and everything!
Fascinating how that happens. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. 🙂
/fwɑːˈɡrɑː/; French: [fwa ɡʁɑ]); French for “fat liver”) is a food product made of the liver of a duck or goose that has been specially fattened. This fattening is typically achieved through gavage (force-feeding corn), according to French law, though outside of France it is occasionally produced using natural feeding.
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