They have been left to the individual, and the individuals are getting fat and causing a drain on our economy and on our public services, affecting everybody, not just themselves.
But regardless, this isn't nanny state. This law does not prohibit people from consuming lots of soda. It prohibits vendors from selling and marketing giant sodas. These companies are making a lot of money by encouraging people to engage in unhealthy behavior - behavior that's costing the rest of us a lot of money and this law stops that. I'm subsidizing the profits of PepsiCola and 7-11 even though I don't consume their products, and I'm tired of it.
-Dan.
Obesity is not the problem that everyone thinks it is here in the US. We can thank the clowns at CSPI - Center for Science in the Public Interest for all of this nonsense. (Ironically enough, they don't value public interest or science, they just push a vegetarian agenda)
They were a big factor behind getting McD's to pull the SuperSize items off of their menu. How did that work out?
(Stats courtesy of CDC)
Pre-2004 removal:
Obesity: 32.2%
Now?:
Obesity: 36.1%
Yeah, removing high calorie items from menus sure works great!
Another problem, CSPI also had a hand in getting to define what's "obese". By the current standard, it's anything over a BMI of 30 (body fat % not accounted for)
Which means that both this guy:
And this guy...
...are both obese.
Yeah, it looks like their calculations are air-tight!
It's also interesting that they classify any BMI over 25 as "overweight"...which means I'm a regular plumper at 6'2" 190lbs.
Also, the cause of death and public health cost numbers they provided were a load of crap too...that's why they had to retract them one month after they published their study:
Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study in the April 20, 2004 Journal of the American Medical Association that estimated the net death toll attributable to obesity to be 25,814 people per year.
This, of course, was quite a downward revision from CDC’s March 1, 2004 claim that obesity caused about 400,000 deaths per year, approaching the toll estimated for smoking.
They found that with the initial calculation, if someone was a BMI of 30+ and died in a car accident (or anything else), the death was attributed to their weight with the way the calculated their first study.
At a little over 25,000 death toll, it puts weight below each of these items in the causes of death category
Heart disease: 599,413
Cancer: 567,628
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 137,353
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 128,842
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 118,021
Alzheimer's disease: 79,003
Diabetes: 68,705
Influenza and Pneumonia: 53,692
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 48,935
Intentional self-harm (suicide): 36,909