Should Government Regulate Food Ingredients?

There have been a series of events in the news the past few years where government has reached one of its tentacles into the world of food. It's done this in the form of regulation.

The FDA banned trans fats. The mayor of NYC attempted to ban super-sized colas as well as drastically decrease the sodium in soups, rolls, cheese, and potato chips. Finland heavily regulated the addition of salt to processed foods within the past few decades.

The list could go on and on. And the question I have to ask is, is this right?

No, I don't want mercury, cancer-causing compounds, or other dangerous ingredients in my food, but regulating portion size, salt, sugar, and fat seems a little extreme to me.

Yes, high amounts of dietary sodium have been linked to hypertension. Large amounts of dietary trans fats have been linked to heart disease. But does government have the right to limit or tax the crap out of unhealthy foods?

I talked about this a good bit in THIS POST about a year or so ago, but I just finished reading Salt, Sugar, Fat by Michael Moss, and it's got me to thinking about it again.

One can draw some very interesting parallels between the fight against processed foods and the fight against the tobacco industry.

Take the 1998 case against tobacco giant Philip Morris. In that year, 40+ states within the US decided that tobacco was to blame for the crumbling health care systems within each state. The states simply couldn't pay for the sheer number of people who were becoming critically ill due to smoking-related illness.

The lawsuit claimed that Philip Morris caused the healthcare crisis. Therefore, they should pay for it.

Morris was fined $365 billion dollars.

Now that is scary.

I'm not a fan of tobacco by any means, but if government can fine a company for making a legal product that everybody wants well after the fact, who's to say that they can't do that to ice cream stands, movie theaters, breweries, vineyards, car companies, cell phone manufacturers, and on and on. Anything that is deemed potentially unhealthy is at risk.

Obesity is reaching pandemic proportions. It's taking the world by storm. And yes, I definitely agree that a shift from made-from-scratch eat-at-home meals to processed crap is a big reason. But is it the food companies fault that people are becoming fat?

A company simply responds to consumer demand. 

If customers want to purchase super fudge chocolate ice cream, the company is going to make it. And if they can make money off of it, then cool. I've got no problem with that.Yeah, I understand that food companies engineer their product to make it as delicious as possible. But don't other companies in other industries do everything they can to make their product as cool as possible as well?

But people, particularly government officials, are starting to blame food companies for causing obesity in the first place. Now I can understand the frustration here. If government is going to pay for your healthcare, then of course they're going to have a larger say in what you can and cannot do. If something is deemed "unhealthy", then they're not gonna want people to do it. They save money that way.

That's one of the problems with relying upon government for healthcare, insurance, etc. You really get screwed over. Especially if you don't have the funds to have other options out there. People don't seem to understand how big of a freedom they're willing to give up for the sake of healthier food.

People buy what they want.

Why should the company that provides a legal product be reprimanded for legally providing people what they want in a free market?

Yeah, I understand it's odd to hear this viewpoint from a personal trainer/exercise physiologist, but I also happen to be a big fan of the Constitution.

Can you ever truly expect potato chips to be healthy? If you eat them, there's really no misunderstanding going on there.You know potato chips don't build six pack abs. So why regulate the snot out of them?

Let's say government decides that people are getting too fat, and therefore food companies need to put caps on the proportion of their food that is fat (really not too far-fetched of an idea). The food companies now have their arms twisted behind their back. They may make a healthier product now, but if it tastes nasty, no one's going to buy it.

Now you've got a product that nobody likes on the market, and your sales drop as a result. When sales drop, stock drops. If you own a mutual fund, there's a good chance that you own a piece of a food company. Do you really want your retirement account to drop in value? Probably not.

If you make a healthy product that no one eats, you've done nothing. 

Take school lunches. A lot of districts have regulated that school lunches be "healthy". The end result? A repulsive menu of meals that has caused many kids to quit eating school lunches all together. Good job, guys. That one backfired didn't it?

Seriously. Ask some of the kids and parents in your neighborhood about the recent change in school lunches. I've talked with quite a few, and have yet to meet any who think the regulation was a good idea.

I don't like to complain without providing alternatives though. So what are my ideas?

1. Food companies should make a healthier alternative of a product people already indulge in. - A lot of them have done this already to still be competitive in a market that's becoming more and more health conscious. If you can decrease the amount of sodium in ice cream without changing the taste, you've made a huge decrease on the population level in the amount of sodium consumed.
2. Put mandatory P.E. classes in schools - I believe this will have a much larger effect on health than making eggplant parmesan for school kids. Typically the more physical activity you get, the better. A lot of people that end up on welfare develop a myriad of health issues due to inactivity and obesity. If you grow up in an unsafe area though, what are you to do? Where are you to play? Mandatory P.E. forces kids to be active, and will cause many of them to develop and discover an interest in various forms of exercise that they would never have found otherwise. 
3. Quit allowing food stamps to buy unhealthy foods - If you're on food stamps, why should you be allowed to purchase Snickers, ice cream, popsicles, and potato chips? If you want to regulate something, regulate this. Food stamps should be like prison. It should motivate you to get the heck out of the current situation, and to make sure that it doesn't happen again.
4. Government-operated grocery stores in low-income areas where no grocery store is within a certain radius. - Areas without access to healthy foods are known as food deserts, and are notorious for their residents living off of highly processed junk. What if we opened grocery stores like this that had to buy food products at the same price as major grocery chains. If this idea wouldn't work, what if we offered major tax-incentive to major grocery chains to build in these poorer areas?

I understand that this is a tricky issue with a few slippery slopes, but ultimately, people buy what they like. People like cellphones, but they cause car wrecks when misused. People like makeup, but it can cause car wrecks when misused. Shoot, people like cars, but they cause car wrecks when misused.

My point is, people are responsible for their own actions. Why do we keep trying to shift the blame?