Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [19]
In the view of some, the rise in type 2 diabetes among kids is tied to an “epidemic” rise in childhood obesity.5 Today, 85 percent of children with type 2 diabetes are obese. That level, too, is rising.6
And obesity is rising not just among children. Between 1960 and 2006, the “percentage of obese adults has nearly tripled…. [T]he proportion… who are ‘extremely obese’ increased more than 600%.”7 Amazingly, less than a third of Americans ages twenty to seventy-four today are at a healthy weight.8 That proportion is not going to improve in the near future.
Obesity-related disease costs the medical system $147 billion annually9—a greater burden than the costs of cigarettes or alcohol.
So what accounts for this bloat? How did we go from being a relatively healthy country to one certain to blow the highest proportion of GDP of any industrialized nation dealing with the consequences of one thousand too many Twinkies?
The most likely reason for this explosion in obesity is a change in what we eat. As people who know something about the matter will testify, we eat too much of the wrong stuff, and not enough of the right stuff: too much sugar, fat, processed food; not enough vegetables and unprocessed food. Between 1990 and 2006 the percentage of adults who ate five or more fruits and vegetables a day fell from 42 percent to 26 percent.10 Americans now drink fifty-two gallons of soft drinks a year, with teenage girls getting 10 to 15 percent of their total caloric intake from Coke or Pepsi.11 These choices matter to our bodies. They make us unhealthy and increasingly fat.
Why we make these particularly bad eating choices is a complicated story. We all (and especially women) work outside the home more than before. That means we have less time to prepare meals and more need for meals prepared by others. The others preparing those meals recognize that certain food qualities—the sweetness, the saltiness, the fattiness—will affect the strength of demand for that food. The ideal demand-inducing mix is all three together: think double-tall caramel latte.12
We’re not about to empower federal food police, however, and neither are we going back to the 1950s, when more of us stayed at home cooking beets (or better). If we’re going to make progress with this problem, we need to think about the parts of the problem that we can actually change.
The part that I want to focus on is the economics of what we eat. Or, more precisely, the economics of the inputs to what we eat. It’s clear we eat a lot of sweet stuff. Since 1985, U.S. consumption of all sugars has increased by 23 percent.13 But what’s interesting is the mix of the sweet stuff we eat. It’s not just sugar, or predominantly sugar. Increasingly it is high-fructose corn syrup, a sugar substitute. In 1980, humans had never tasted high-fructose corn syrup. In 1985 it accounted for 35 percent of sugar consumption. In 2006 that number had risen to over 41 percent.14
Why?
One simple answer is price. Natural sugar is expensive, relative to high-fructose corn syrup. So the market in sweeteners moves more and more to this sugar substitute. Or better, races to this sugar substitute. Forty percent of the products in your supermarket right now have high-fructose corn syrup in them.15 That number is certain to rise.
Invocation of the “market” is likely to lead some to say, “Them’s just the breaks.” Markets are designed to channel resources to where they can be most efficiently used, and to push out inefficient inputs for more-efficient ones.
Yet lovers of the market should hesitate a bit here before they embrace this particular mix of sweetness. Indeed, an alarm for free-market souls should sound whenever anyone talks about the input costs from agriculture and related industries. Even for a liberal like me, it is astonishing to recognize just