Burgers, fries and other high-fat foods are making the Americans who consume them sick and should be slapped with a high-fat supertax, contends Kelly D. Brownell, director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders.
America's "toxic food environment" offers up "a diet that is high in fat, high in calories, delicious, widely available and low in cost," according to Professor Brownell, who is affiliated with the departments of psychology and of epidemiology and public health.
"A whopping 7 percent of Americans eat at McDonald's on any given day and the average child sees 10,000 food commercials a year on television, 95 percent of them for candy, fast food, soft drinks and sugared cereals," says Professor Brownell. And still, people are bombarded with messages to eat more, he adds.
Furthermore, the ever-increasing number of labor-saving devices are conspiring "to remove activity from the modern lifestyle," he says. "Is it any wonder that the prevalence of obesity in America has increased 25 percent in the last 15 years alone to an unprecedented level of 35 percent of women and 31 percent of men?" In fact, obesity exacts a public health toll of approximately $40 billion a year due to higher rates of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, hypertension and stroke, he says.
In a recent issue of the journal Addictive Behavior, Professor Brownell and Yale graduate student E. Katherine Battle propose that food should be regarded as a potentially disease-causing agent, just like tobacco or alcohol. Further, they suggest that revenues from a high-fat tax be used to provide more opportunities and incentives for physical activity in the community, such as bicycle paths, recreation centers and exercise programs. Such a tax could also help fund nutrition education programs in public schools, they say.
"Junk food advertisements should be regulated and excise taxes imposed on high-fat foods, just as they are on tobacco and alcohol," Professor Brownell says. "Taxing cigarettes has a clear and predicable impact on sales and per capita consumption, so it would seem logical that a high-fat tax, combined with increased physical activity, might have a positive effect on eating disorders and obesity."
In fact, "the next new frontier to be explored in the eating disorders and obesity field is that of prevention, rather than treatment," says Professor Brownell, adding that statistics have shown there is a high failure rate in treatment programs for obesity. Even when successful, treatment programs are costly and available to relatively few people, which argues for an increase in prevention efforts, he says.
"Legislation and regulations aimed at the price structure of foods, opportunities and incentives for increased physical activity, and control of exposure to messages leading to unhealthy eating could have a considerable public health impact -- at very little cost," he concludes.