Obesity is a lifestyle problem. In order to fix it, America is going to have to change its culture which seems to me to be based on consumption. I had the pleasure of attending the Keystone Youth Policy Summit on Obesity and to talk with stakeholders concerning the obesity epidemic and worked with other students in proposing different policies to combat the rising trends of obesity. We considered several things that we did in class, an example being that poorer people tend to be more obese. So we focused a lot of attention on the lower class. One idea proposed was to give incenitives to food stamp users to buy healthier foods. This was later discussed and changed to making it mandatory for food stamp users to buy so much certified healthy food (like 25%) with their food stamps. (For the record, I supported making food stamps go further for food stamps meaning that you could buy more healthier food with your food stamps than unhealthy. Personally I believe in convincing people to do things than making them, but I was outvoted not to say that I still don't believe that both ways would be effective.) We also noted that it is easier to prevent a person from becoming obese than getting the already obese to drop the weight, so a lot of our efforts were focused on the schools and education.
If anyone would like to see the incredibly long paper that was a result of this conference, just ask me and I can bring it to school to show you. I could just show you the good parts so you wouldnt have to read the whole thing.
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