Flashback – Blame the Sugar

[In February of 2012 I provided another example of how Americans are encouraged by the media to shift the blame rather than take responsibility. Each time we do, we give politicians and regulators a new target for bans and restrictions. This in turn relieves us of the responsibility of making choices along with the risks that some of those choices might turn out to be wrong, but it also deprives otherwise responsible people from making any choices at all. At the time I wondered if sugar would be next on the list.]

In past blogs I have warned that if we don't begin to change our behavior, especially by acting responsibly, bad consequences will continue. This lax attitude can force the government to step in, threatening our freedom. The idea of a threat to freedom may seem like an abstract concept, perhaps a little difficult to pin down. Now we have another concrete example.

Published Wednesday in Nature, a study by three scientists from UC San Francisco finds that sugar is as bad for us as alcohol and tobacco and should be likewise regulated.  This article from the LA Times gives the details. The study's authors make recommendations to the Federal Government including: taxation, distribution controls, age limits, and a limit or ban on television commercials for processed foods containing any form of added sugar. This is what I mean by loss of freedom.   Besides the alcohol and tobacco restrictions, there have been local bans on transfats. Today it's sugar. What next?

This article is interesting because I find the wording, "sugar...is responsible" near the beginning and "sugar itself is to blame" further on. It's the sugar's fault and we are the victims! How long are we going to let inanimate objects take the rap for us? If we don't step up and take responsibility for our behavioral failures and begin to make some changes, well-intentioned people will call for government action and our freedoms will slowly erode. Meanwhile, we will be standing around wondering how it happened!

Flashback – Responsibility and Excuses

[How things have changed from when I originally titled this “Evidence Abounds” back in 2011. These days news is dominated by coronavirus and politics (or the mixture). What hasn’t changed is the tendency to use excuses in place of responsibility and the media’s willingness to encourage this behavior. First see the flashback comments.]

How hard is it to find evidence of problematic behavior in one or more of the five dimensions or of institutionalized support for these habits? – Surprisingly easy.  There are days when I have to pick and choose among available topics.

Today I have an Associated Press article left over from 3 weeks ago presenting research that tells how hormones make it more difficult to keep weight off after dieting.  The headline begins, “Not your fault!”  This is right out of the poor discipline/poor responsibility playbook.  It gives people the excuse that they can’t stick to their diet because of their hormones.  Ironically the header above the article features six advertising links, five of which are for weight-loss products, programs or surgery – the easy answers that everyone looks for when faced with the hard work of getting back to and staying at the right weight.  This is practically the definition of discipline and responsibility failures that bubble up into many other societal issues and crises (budgeting, smoking, and alcohol abuse, to name a few).

How, in the first place, can any reputable scientist say that hormones are the problem?  Didn’t humans have the same hormones many years ago when the number of overweight Americans was less than half of what it is today?  It just doesn’t add up.

Second, how can the parent of a teenager use hormones as an excuse for regaining weight and not let that teenager use hormones as an excuse for any of their own destructive decisions?  This sounds like a can of worms ready to be opened.

I have sometimes jokingly said that if I ever got arrested for anything, I’d just tell the police that what I was doing was performance art and protected under the First Amendment.  Now, I guess, if that doesn’t fly, I have the excuse of hormones to fall back on.  

[Well, that was then, but in 2020, a NOVA episode was dedicated to blaming obesity mostly on genes using examples of rare cases. It's a little hard to believe that our genes are so much different from Americans living in the 1950s and 60s. Does evolution work that fast, or is it just another handy excuse?]

Flashback - Restaurant Menus

[Last Month I posted a flashback to “Behavior Has Consequences” from September 2011. The following month I used the regulations intended to make restaurant menus more transparent to show problems in each of the behavioral dimensions. Here, from October 2011, is “Restaurant Menus Demonstrate My Point.”]

Last time I reinforced the need for critical thinking by pointing out the dubious value of self-reporting surveys. Whether about politics or personal habits, they tend to be an inaccurate reflection of actual choices and behavior. I wonder why news agencies spend so much time on them. Here is an article from CBS that reinforces the point and gives good examples of conflicts within the other four dimensions as well. It’s about healthier menu choices in restaurants.

The report begins, “while 47 percent of Americans say they'd like restaurants to offer healthier items like salads and baked potatoes, only 23 percent tend to order those foods…” Since the information comes from different surveys, we must be careful, but the general behavior, if not the specific percentages, is confirmed by sales figures presented later in the report. Again there seems to be a significant discrepancy between what people say and how they actually behave.

As we read further, they remind us, “The government has stepped up its oversight — and influence — over the industry that it blames for America's expanding waistline.” This blatant admission that the government does not blame people for eating the wrong foods but blames the restaurant industry, leads the government to seek solutions by regulating restaurants instead of expecting personal responsibility to change behavior. When they find out this requirement of listing calories and offering more healthy choices is not working, what is their next option? How do they escalate when they don’t trust us to do the right thing? Next logical steps might be to increase threats to our personal freedom, perhaps minor at first, but where would it end? As this controlling philosophy remains predominant in the minds of government officials, they will feel justified in regulating many of our other choices.

Later the report cites efforts of a couple of restaurants to conform to the regulations. They don’t mention that in one way or another we are paying for the additional food preparation, research and reprinting of menus; but as we are strong in economic understanding, we are all aware of this. Like any other attempt to solve a behavior problem by attacking symptoms with regulations, it inevitably leads to higher costs for the public – not unlike the additional fees that came on the heels of consumer credit card protection – but it does not solve the problem. Most Americans and the government have yet to learn the main lesson of economic understanding – new regulations create added costs that are not absorbed by the business but are passed along to the customer.

Finally, why don’t people choose the healthy menu items? Examples in the report list as reasons: peer pressure and that “healthier foods also are usually among the most expensive menu items.” Both reasons relate to perspective: overly caring about the opinions of other people and not looking at the effects of today’s decisions on long-term health outcomes. 

All this effort and regulation tries to solve a problem (unhealthy eating) brought on by a behavioral problem (a failure in discipline). 

This single article, read from a behavioral standpoint, reinforces my point that weaknesses in the five key behavioral dimensions are the root cause of most of our contemporary crises, and therein lie the solutions, not in any outside programs or government interventions no matter how well intentioned.

Paying Attention to the Wrong Things

How many Americans spend their lives paying attention to the wrong things and to the wrong people? About once a month I’ve explained how celebrity endorsements of various products are mostly misleading, resulting in wasted time and money, sometimes putting people and their families in serious danger. Vaccine-hesitancy is just one small example of this in the present-day news.

This came to mind when the tomatoes I had raised from seeds in the back window and planted in the garden were devastated by the storms of May in the Midwest – no tornados, but enough wind to tear the delicate leaves of the stems. I was forced to buy hardier replacements at the local nursery. On one pot were the words, “FOODIE FRESH,” whatever that means. I began to wonder, where did all this foodie business come from, and why do people pay any attention?

First found in print in 1980, the dictionary definition of a foodie is a person who has an ardent or refined interest in food. 

Surely this is a new phenomenon, unlikely to be driven by some inherited predisposition from ancient times. I can’t imagine our hunter-gatherer ancestors being overly fussy about the food they ate, perhaps complaining that the wild boar from one jungle was more tasty and tender than one from another field. That would have led to quick extinction of the race – or at least of the foodie-oriented genes. No, they were more concerned with survival, a factor that is easily taken for granted today.

More recently, in the Great Depression, or even in most of the second half of the last century, food was not as plentiful as it is today. Foodies were non-existent and those who were considered gourmets usually came from the upper class, the idle rich.

But in this century things have changed. We have a Specialty Food Association, who sponsored the 2012 Culinary Visions Panel Survey, that gave us the following:

• Three-quarters (76 percent) of U.S. adults enjoy talking about new or interesting foods. 53 percent of U.S. adults regularly watch cooking shows. 
• 54 percent of casual diners are considered foodies because of their desire to always or usually try new menu items when going to a restaurant.

Percentages are likely higher today as being considered a foodie has become a status symbol.

Another, more recent source tells: “A study of 2,000 Americans examined the rise of the foodie phenomenon and found that 62% would go to an event just for the food.” And “Seventy-seven percent say food is important when attending any public event.” Perhaps foodie is more closely related to a gourmand, a word that carries in addition to refined or discriminating taste, the “connotations of one who enjoys food in great quantities.”

The simple promotional statement on the side of a plastic tomato pot plus a little research leads to the conclusion that in the middle of a so-called “Obesity Epidemic” advertisers and consumers themselves are glamorizing the idea of an obsession with food, especially more exotic choices. Being a foodie becomes a source of pride, an opportunity to boast of one's discriminating taste and giving the show-off implicit permission to indulge. And any effort to disparage the movement would be considered shaming.

A little more perspective might make people appreciate the true blessing of having regular access to ordinary food, that is, to pay more attention to the right things.

Weight Loss and Diets

In America the news media tell us that we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic. This is clearly a discipline issue. As in most cases about the dimension of discipline, the answer is simple to understand and hard to do. Apparently though, and typically, a great number or people think there is some easy path to weight loss.

That’s why Americans buy about 5 million diet books every year. Millions are looking for that magic answer and presumably going back to buy a second and third book as each particular formula invariably fails them. Hundreds of different diet books are listed on Amazon, many labeled as best sellers. I found from another source a list of the ten best books on the Ketogenic diet. How many books do we need on a diet described as an “extreme form of low-carbohydrate diet” originally used to treat epilepsy in children a century ago. But today, by way of “celebrity endorsement it has become a popular weight-loss fad diet, but there is no evidence of any distinctive benefit for this purpose, and it risks causing a number of side effects.The British Dietetic Association named it one of the ‘top 5 worst celeb diets to avoid in 2018’.” 

This article in the Guardian from earlier in the year challenges these diet programs with all their accompanying hype by presenting five myths about weight loss. The thrust of the argument is that people tend to misjudge the dangers of their condition as well as their personal progress toward their goals.

People can hugely misjudge their calorie intake, and overweight people have a strong tendency to grossly underestimate the calorie content of their food (by about 47%). Those who believe they are fat but healthy, according to the writer, are deluding themselves. Being overweight is inherently unhealthy. “Their risk of becoming ill was eight times higher than that of the healthy group with normal weight. The risks include, but are not limited to: diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, sleep apnea, arthritis/joint problems, fertility problems, asthma, back pain, incontinence, gout and stroke.”

The BBC reinforces the seriousness by proclaiming in this headline “Obesity-related cancers rise for younger US generations, study says.”

The other side of the problem has to do with the fact that people also misjudge other factors including: how many calories they burn through exercise, how overweight they are, that the extra weight doesn’t slow them down or that they can blame it on genetic differences. (See last Friday’s comments.) 

The most reliable advice comes from people not trying to sell books or diet programs, for example, advice from the book, The Cure for Everything, which I also referred to last Friday. Exercise is necessary and healthy, but it does little toward weight loss without a change in eating habits. (This is backed up by over 60 independent studies.) It’s not about a diet, in the popular sense of the word, but in a lifestyle choice. To make good choices the author recommends paying close attention to what you eat, either by calorie counting or any other method. This “forced self-monitoring…causes you to eat less, which is the only way to lose weight” (p. 54). The tendency to give yourself special treats for being successful or to treat the whole exercise as a temporary “diet” yields only temporary results – an outcome familiar to so many. It’s all about portion size.

This certainly seems Spartan and the opposite of fun, but simple-to-understand-and-hard-to-do is the hallmark of discipline. Unfortunately, the search for magic answers continues; but doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different outcome is the mark of insanity. Quoting from the book one more time: “If you see the word detoxify, cleanse, supplement or metabolism associated with a product or process, be suspicious. Someone is trying to sell you something that likely does not work and, in fact might be harmful” (p. 92). (I would add celebrity endorsements to the list of warning signs.)

Always a Good Excuse

Studying pea plants during the years around 1860, Gregor Mendel, a scientist and Augustinian friar at St. Thomas' Abbey in Brno, suggested the presence of discrete inheritable units in nature. He studied inheritance patterns in 8000 varieties, tracking the transfer of identifiable physical characteristics passed down from the parent plants to next generations. Almost 50 years later Wilhelm Johannsen coined the term “gene.” After almost another 50 years Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins use X-ray crystallography to try to detect these inheritable units, leading to Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double-stranded helix DNA molecule.

Today we hear references to genes every day, but the science is still developing. Regardless of that, many people know just enough about genetics and inherited traits to use it as an easy excuse for any fault they don’t want to correct. Genes represent the hand nature has dealt us, and there is nothing we can do to change them – no diet, no exercise, no vitamin, nothing.

This point was made in a book I recently read, The Cure for Everything by Timothy Caulfield. In the introduction to the chapter about genes as health factors, he lists several headlines telling not of the scientific advances in the field, but of how the field has become popularized by promising cures for these immutable factors through some type of gene technology. (These are another variant of the news philosophy that I described back in early March when I wrote Stoking the Fear.)

His list of popular headlines included:

• Is Laziness Gene to Blame for Couch Potatoes?
• The God Gene, Does Our DNA Compel Us to Seek a Higher Power?
• Always Lost? : It May Be in Your Genes
• Party Animal: It May Be in Your Genes
• Marriage Problems?: Husband’s Genes May Be the Problem
• Genes May Affect Popularity, Researchers Say.

Since the book was published in 2012, I thought I could go on line and add to the list of handy  excuses:

• Pity the poor murderer, his genes made him do it
• "Mom gene" discovered in mice: Do you have it?
• "Binge-drinking gene" discovered
• Intelligence genes discovered by scientists
• Sweet-tooth Gene Discovered
• Obesity gene Discovery Could Lead to New Treatments
• Anxiety, Aggression Gene Discovered

So if you are not too bright, overweight due to your sweet tooth, tend to binge drink, are lazy, unfaithful to your spouse, a bad parent, unpopular and may be prone to anxiety or aggression or even more brutal forms of violence, not to worry. It's not your fault; you're not responsible. You can blame it all on your genes, sit back and wait for science to fix you! Of course if the headline, “First 'placebo gene' discovered” applies to you, you don’t even have to wait. With your increased susceptibility to the placebo effect, you can look up the first charlatan or natural medicine guru selling a sham treatment or a miracle cure and talk your self into getting better.

Gene research is important and may lead to some significant progress toward real cures, but so far all these somewhat outrageous health-related headlines are just a distraction. Responsible people don’t go looking for easy excuses.

Irresponsibility: Finding Excuses

Last time I was very pleased to find an example of strong behavior in the dimension of responsibility. The woman attacked by the jaguar at the zoo admitted her part in the incident and hoped that others would learn from her mistake. 

When someone is in the wrong, the common reaction seems to be denial or making excuses. The news lately is filled with celebrities, politicians and their defenders quick to deny a charge, downplay the seriousness of a charge or call attention to all the celebrities or politicians in the past who did the same or worse without ramifications. So it’s OK?

Making excuses covers a multitude of sins, and it serves as a convenient, and often accepted, way  if covering up for behavioral slip-ups in any of the five key dimensions.

One area where this comes into play is when weak behavior in the area of discipline leads to unwanted consequences, for example, lung cancer from smoking, retirement insecurity from failure to save during the working years or obesity.

Along the lines of the latter I found this article on line: “10 Reasons Why Obesity Is NOT About Gluttony and Sloth.” First, the author obviously used the most provocative words possible to describe a situation characterized by a simple lack of discipline, too little exercise or too large portion sizes. Use of the terms gluttony and sloth, boarders on name-calling; they arouse a sense of resentment to prepare the reader to be receptive to a litany of ready-made excuses.

And here they come, all the reasons an unmotivated person can fall back on:

• Obesogenic Environment: where living in an area without sidewalks or safe walking routes coupled with a lack of accessibility to fresh fruits and vegetables along with other environmental factors may add challenges. (People would be thin as rails if only they had sidewalks.)
• Culture of Beauty: drives people toward an unattainable standard, encouraging “self-starvation, exercise abuse, and other eating disorders. It really only serves those who make money off of it.” (This stems from a perspective problem, being manipulated by external values.)
• Mental Health problems “from depression and anxiety to chronic stress and past trauma” can become an issue. “Weight gain can be the result of emotional eating as a way to cope or a result of medications.” (See addiction below for the same excuse in different words.)
• Genetics: While genetics does not predict obesity, over time the combination with other factors may predispose individuals to have obesity issues (though that doesn’t explain why it would suddenly become a factor in the last 50 years.)
• Social Networks: Social influences “play a role in our health behaviors including eating, exercise, weight loss or gain.” (Blame it on your friends.)
• Food Addiction: works like other addictions as “a way to cope with uncomfortable feelings and situations in life.” (Is it realistic to expect life to be comfortable all the time? How easy to forget that life in this century is more comfortable than at any other time in history.)
• Lack of Awareness: too many confusing “messages about what to eat, how to exercise, and ways to lose fat” leave “most of us…scratching our heads.” (But most of these confusing messages come from the purveyors of easy solutions, miracle diet plans and magic answers or from scientists trying to secure funding.)
• Family Income: “Soda is less expensive than water…” (Last I checked water is so inexpensive that I take a shower in it! It falls from the sky! Unless you live in a place like Flint, MI, this argument is as bogus as they come! See here for more about the expensive healthy food myth.)
• Environmental Chemicals in lab experiments alter the metabolism and increasing “the size and number of fat cells in animal exposed to chemicals.” (Blame it on the chemicals, while ignoring the difference between lab experiments and reality.)
• Fat Shame: causes the internalization of society’s fat phobia…creating the most harm. (But change is hard; it doesn’t happen without some discomfort as a motivation. If anything, society has become overly sensitive to the idea of fat shaming and many other attitudes labeled as intolerant.)

So there they are, ready-made excuses to maintain an unhealthy lifestyle. Just spouting off one or two of these (and ignoring the comments in parentheses) is a lot easier than taking responsibility for lapses in discipline.

To Breakfast or Not To Breakfast?

That continues to be the question.  When I was growing up many years ago, we were told that breakfast was your most important meal.  The government still subscribes to this as many communities provide breakfast as well as lunch to qualifying students, subsidized with federal funds through the USDA’s School Breakfast Program (SBP).

It wasn’t too long ago that the news took the opposite view of breakfast.  Only 16 months ago I published the original To Breakfast or Not To Breakfast telling how breakfast had been declared optional based on a paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.  This opinion was backed up by an earlier (Summer 2014) study reported by the Huffington Post and USA Today.

The emphasis was on whether people who were skipping breakfast to lose weight were making a good decision.  They surmised that from a standpoint of weight loss, skipping might hold a slight benefit.  If you are hungrier at lunch and eat a little more, it will usually not be enough to offset all the calories missed from skipping breakfast.  So the net intake would be favorable.

But that stance was so 2017! The latest study is in and we are back to eating breakfast as a better solution.  (I originally saw the story on a TV health segment but these two sources are available on line here and here).

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic divided 347 healthy adults into three groups, those who never ate breakfast, those who ate infrequently (one to four times a week), and those who regularly ate breakfast (five to seven days a week).  Then they followed them for 12 years and found that the breakfast eaters ended up with “smaller waistlines and were less likely to be obese.”

But the really scary part of the report came next. The “people who ate breakfast regularly only gained about three pounds over the past year. People who ate breakfast occasionally put on five pounds, while people who skipped a morning meal entirely gained eight pounds and developed dangerous belly fat.”  (Since this was a 12-year study, it is unclear why they only reported on weight gain over the past year.)  In any case, notice that the breakfast eaters did better, but on average no single group lost weight!  Isn’t it interesting that success is now defined not as losing weight, but as not gaining as much as the other guy.

After reporting on the study, each of the news sources turned to their expert who dazzled readers with such earth-shattering observations as:  people should “stick to healthier foods in the morning [and]…avoid high density, sugar-filled foods.” They should also “consider how many nutritionally empty foods they eat during the day – and then cut those out.” (Not earth-shattering after all - just common sense.) This sounds more like the dimension of discipline than any magical link between breakfast and weight loss.

This whole breakfast question, like so many others in the health-research category, is like being on an amusement park ride with abrupt corners, twists and turns only to end up in the same place we started.  Of course, no one can explain why there would be a link between eating breakfast and weight loss, so the issue is still up in the air until the next study is published. 

This and That

Critical thinking leads to some interesting questions and observations.

A friend recently asked me why he has to pay for syringes for his wife’s diabetes injections while drug addicts on the street can get them for free, funded by taxpayers like him.

How can people plan to pay for their children’s education or their own retirement when they can’t even plan for an annual vacation?  “According to a survey by financial planning company LearnVest, 74 percent of Americans have taken on debt to go on vacation.  The study surveyed 1,000 adults. It showed that, on average, Americans take on about $1,100 in debt for each vacation.”

The article adds:  “Around 55 percent of Americans forget to plan ahead for vacations when setting their budget for the year, according to the survey. It also shows that one-third of Americans would rather save money for a vacation than for a house or retirement.”  (See my earlier comments on vacation planning and gasoline price.)

People are puzzling about the drastic increase in overweight pets.  An analysis from veterinary clinics across the country of about 2.5 million dogs and 500,000 cats treated last year found an increase of more than 150% in overweight dogs and cats over the last 10 years.  About 1 in 3 are either overweight or obese.  The only surprise here is that they are still doing better than their owners.  (Can I say owners or do I have to call them pet parents for fear of offending someone?)

What is the city council of Minneapolis thinking?  They want to “require stores to charge a fee for any type of bag — paper or plastic — they give out.”  Can’t they see that this will hurt the poor the most?  Don’t they know that more people know about recycling than know that cloth grocery bags should be washed out periodically to avoid cross-contamination?

Two studies, one from University of Washington and the other the University of California, Berkeley, about the effects of the first tier of minimum wage increases in Seattle came to different conclusions.  One says it hurts the workers; the other says the workers benefit.  But Forbes reports there are “potential problems with both studies.”  The jury is still out and many economists do agree that the potential success or failure will be influenced by factors unique to the Seattle economy.  This is why it’s so important to conduct most of these experiments on the state and local level, rather than trying to impose a one-size-fits-all solution from Washington, then wring our hands as flaws later appear.

Here is a link to an informative table.  It shows murder rates by state by year from 2001 to 2015 with highlights showing which states had the death penalty (also by year).  It appears that the death penalty has no effect at all on the murder rates, even looking at data from individual states that banned it during that time period.  But some persist in defending capital punishment despite the fact that besides apparently not deterring crime, those cases are many times more costly than comparable cases.

Also interesting is that, despite what we might hear on the news or from politicians, the overall murder rate in America is half of what it was in 1980.

It’s a strange world we live in.  We all must be critical thinkers and question rather than passively accept any idea just because it sounds good.

Obesity Can't Be Healthy

A little more than ten years ago the “fat pride movement” began to pick up momentum.  The claim, supported by some studies at the time, was that it was possible to be fat and fit, that an active overweight person was healthier than a sedentary skinny person.  This was good news for those who felt they were being discriminated against and bullied due to their body shape and size.

When I list and describe the five behavioral dimensions, responsibility always follows discipline.  The simple reason is that it’s easier to find an excuse or justification rather than doing the hard work to address a problem, whether that be quitting a bad habit, saving more for retirement or maintaining the proper weight.  Dieting is hard; lifestyle changes are challenging.  A movement that advocates acceptance over change can be both refreshing and alluring to those who are struggling.  Why do the hard work when there may be supportive medical research as well as a possibility that the rest of society can be pressured into accepting us the way we are?

Last week the main argument for fat pride was undermined by a new study.  After examining the medical record of 3.5 million people in Britain over 20 years, this yet unpublished study found that “people who were obese but who had no initial signs of heart disease, diabetes or high cholesterol were not protected from ill health in later life.”  This contradicted much of the previous research.

In the study, people who were obese but metabolically healthy, that is with factors such as blood pressure and blood sugar within recommended limits "were at higher risk of developing heart disease, strokes and heart failure than people of normal weight.”

Other factors do enter in, such as weight distribution, genes and other lifestyle choices.  A very large sample is important because some overweight people live a long time, as do some smokers.  But the advice from medical professionals remains the same:  not smoking, eating a balanced diet, exercising regularly, getting the proper amount of sleep and limiting alcohol.

Except for the impressive size of the study, this is not exactly breaking news.  A few years ago, Forbes ran an article about an earlier study concluding “for most people, healthy obesity is just a phase that will likely give way to unhealthy obesity in the future” rather than putting them in the same risk category as healthy thinner people.

Losing weight and keeping it off is hard work.  It’s easier to grasp at excuses.  People should not be bullied or harassed for being overweight; they should be supported in their quest for a better, longer life.  This is true for a couple of reasons.  First, to tolerate poor behavioral choices that result in controllable consequences is to compromise our standards.  Second, in America, like it or not, the cost of everyone’s healthcare is charged back to all of society through insurance premiums.  The healthy support the sick.  The smokers, drug abusers, obese, etc. are an economic burden on the rest.  It’s everyone’s civic responsibility to be as healthy as possible to minimize the waste in society.

Predictable But Still Unexpected

In February 2013 when I wrote, “Will airlines charge based on the total weight of the luggage and the passenger?” some people thought I must have been joking.  Here is a reliable news source reporting another step in that direction.  “Two American Samoan businessmen have filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Transportation alledging [sic] they may have been the target of discrimination after being weighed while boarding a recent flight from Honolulu.

“In the complaints, the men also say they were assigned new seats on the aircraft that they did not originally select, to ensure that the weight on the flight was evenly distributed.”

I don’t claim any supernatural powers.  In most cases, any semblance of clairvoyance is merely a matter of looking at behavior and predicting the logical consequences.  Airlines already weigh baggage.  They also must estimate the weight of passengers to calculate the amount of fuel needed to safely make the flight.  In this case, after finding that the fuel burn on certain flights was consistently higher than expected, they ran a survey to find how far off their estimates had been and to make the appropriate adjustments.

The businessmen were not barred from the flight or apparently inconvenienced in any way except to be assigned new seats to better balance the plane.  It seems reasonable that passengers, even though they were customers of the airline, would be interested in cooperating to make sure the airplane they were riding in for many hours over open water was properly balanced and had enough fuel.  But as I noted last week, some people are so spoiled that they look for ways to be offended.

This was just a weight distribution issue, but the trend continues.  “In 2013, Samoa Air became the world's first airline to charge passengers according to size.”  Ticket prices are based on combined weight of passenger and baggage.  With an adult obesity rate estimated around 95 percent, it’s not surprising that American Samoans became the first to face this new fare scheme.  But as the issues of fuel and balance are real for every airline, will they be the last?   In what other unexpected areas will the consequences of our problems with discipline affect our lives and wallets?