The Government’s planned war on fast food is not a healthy option
Health Department officials have, according to reports, been in contact with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office to see how — shades of the tobacco ban — the Big Apple reined in the fast food giants. The minister is also following the British precedent and writing directly to all fast food companies in Ireland asking them to label all their menus with the calorie content.
Dr Reilly is swimming with the tide. It is the height of fashion to hate McDonald’s and KFC, to finger the Golden Arches and Colonel Sanders for every social ill from obesity to twisting of children’s minds to the devastation of local communities. It’s a kind of moralism suffused with anti-capitalism and a dose of anti-Americanism masquerading as concern for health.
It’s not hard to see through the health campaigners. Their disdain for the McMasses — the trashy types that eat at fast food restaurants — is thinly disguised. High-minded pseudo-medical concern for other people’s wellbeing is all too often really a judgment on the lazy plebs who can’t be bothered to throw together a Caesar salad, who are susceptible to the predations of advertising, and who obviously don’t love their children or why would they let them chomp on trans-fats washed down with fizzy pop? Yes, the war against junk food is really a proxy for the war against junk people.
There’s a worrying class component to this health mania. Talking about obesity, for instance, is one sneaky way of dividing the good-for-nothings from the morally upstanding. Being slim and having thin kids is the contemporary equivalent of performing good works. Your actions — gym three times a week, picking at a salad, denying little Aoife a can of Coke — are evidence that redemption is yours. Isn’t your slender frame proof positive?
There’s something of that make-’em-feel-bad thinking behind the idea of putting calorie counts on fast food menus, too, making us feel guilty as we step out for a bite.
The law introduced by Mayor Bloomberg in 2008 requiring chain restaurants with 15 or more branches nationally to provide calorie information on menu boards was the subject of an interesting recent study published in the British Medical Journal. Altogether, it found, 15% of those surveyed — not many, in other words — said they had used the calorie intake figures to help them make their eating decisions. The other 85% turned two blind eyes.
But — and this was trumpeted loudly by the health brigade — the information did cause those who did pay any attention to make healthier choices. “Customers who reported using the calorie information after regulation purchased 106 fewer calories, on average, compared with customers who didn’t see or didn’t use the information,” the study reported.
As you might expect, the impact was biggest on women, and on those living in wealthier suburbs. But perhaps “impact” is the too strong a word. 106 calories is equivalent to one-fifth of a Big Mac. Take into account the six-sevenths of people who didn’t pay the blindest bit of attention to the calorie warnings and that amounts to an average of 16 calories fewer per customer. I’m not a nutritionist: is that one slice of gherkin or two? And this is going to halt our cardiovascular disease epidemic? Come off it, minister.
He might argue the health of the nation is improved by lots of little steps. But what happens if you eat a morsel less at the fast food joint only to feel a bit peckish later on? Half a biscuit, two bites of an apple would be enough to undermine all the good work you’d done by being so self-controlled in the face of all those creepy calorie calculations. As the report into the New York case states: “Overall, there was no change in mean energy content of lunchtime purchases from fast food chains after the introduction of calorie information for all menu items.” In other words, it was all a complete waste of time.
Except in one sense. All those guardians of our health felt immeasurably more superior while a few of the rich women who actually enjoy sinking their teeth into a burger once in a while were made to feel a soupcon more anxious — as if we weren’t all becoming fearful enough of our food already.
Food should be both sustenance and pleasure. The demand that we constantly check our desires against some government-imposed calorie-related target robs us of this joy, replacing it with guilt and fear instead.
Let’s get real. All those calorie intake figures in no time become so ubiquitous that we’ll soon barely even notice them. Of course, calories exist in fast food places — lots of them, yummy ones. That’s all you need to know, right? Who ever thought McDonald’s and KFC were about cordon bleu cuisine anyway? It’s soul food that they sell, not a ticket to everlasting life. It’s quick, it’s junk, the cheese slices taste like they left the plastic wrapper on them — and you don’t need the Department of Health to point out these blindingly obvious things.
Not that the restaurant chains will complain much. They will be able to flog lower-calorie options — less food for more money — to their customers.
The New York experience should — but probably won’t — cause the health vigilantes to think twice. At best, these calorie labels have had an extremely limited effect on the kind of people who are already more likely than most to agonise about their weight.
If we allow the state to determine whether or not we smoke, eat fast food, drink pop or anything else, we undermine even the most basic capacity for independent thought. We might end up shiny, slim examples of radiant health, but in a social and political sense we will be disabled, unable to make sensible judgments for ourselves. It’s this loss of control over own lives that should really be taxing us.
Ah, but what about the little darlings who can’t be relied upon to think for themselves? It seems every government when it knows it’s got a crappy argument boils it down to one about “our precious children”. OK, so calorie warnings won’t make the blindest bit of difference to heart attack rates but aren’t I ignoring the dangers presented by childhood obesity?
Actually, no. There are so many false assumptions at play here: fast food is what makes kids fat; fast food marketing causes childhood obesity; fat children make unhealthy adults; fat kids incur higher healthcare costs, and so on. A hundred years ago, today’s penchant for thin children would have been considered a shocking instance of child neglect.
A succession of governments, utterly devoid of an inspiring idea between them, have turned to scaring us sick — sometimes quite literally — in their desperate desire to connect with and regulate our lives. My advice? Politely tell them to “burger off” and do something about poverty which, unlike fast food, really does limit life expectancy.
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