First Lady Michelle Obama hopes to curb childhood obesity by teaching children about nutrition and exercise. “There’s no expert on this planet who says that the government telling people what to do actually does any good with this issue,” she says.

But local government officials around the country have already adopted a more forceful tact, whether it’s New York’s salt assault, San Francisco’s frown at Happy Meals or, most recently, South LA’s all-out ban on new fast-food restaurants.

Reason.tv spoke with Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks, one of the architects behind the ban, who argues that “in order to force choice into the market, we have to limit one that is overconcentrated and attract others that provide other options.”

Reason Magazine editor in chief Matt Welch is skeptical of “the idea that you can create more choices by reducing choices,” and fitness consultant and documentary filmmaker Chazz Weaver—who ate McDonald’s for 30 days and lost body fat—points out that consumers can eat fast food in moderation and still stay healthy. Reason.tv also spoke with the co-owner of The Burger Stand in South Los Angeles about why he thinks that banning new fast-food restaurants is bad for business and bad for his community.

(more…)

One of the more extreme proposals floated early in the national health care debate was the idea of taxing soda and other sugary beverages. That trial balloon was almost immediately shot down by the American public, but the Obama administration is attempting to achieve, by subterfuge, soda taxes and a lot of other ways to micromanage our lives in the name of public health—whether or not ObamaCare passes. The mechanism is buried in last year’s $862-billion-and-counting stimulus bill, and works by diverting hundreds of millions of dollars that should be promoting economic growth to instead pay lobbyists to push for higher taxes and nanny-state controls over our lives.

It’s on pages 66 and 67 on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which created a $1 billion “Prevention and Wellness Fund.” Of that, $650 million went to Kathleen Sebelius’s Department of Health and Human Services and has been used to start a new program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) called “Communities Putting Prevention to Work” (CPPW).

Where does that giant pot of grant funding under the CPPW go? What it calls “MAPPS Interventions for Communities Putting Prevention to Work.” MAPPS stands for “Media, Access, Point of decision information, Price, and Social support/services.” In other words, strategies for changing our behavior, for social engineering on a large-scale, and, it seems, circumventing the normal democratic process. In a 14-page guidance for grant applicants, the CDC details tactics that grant applicants should include in their plans. It includes “counter-advertising” against targeted products, complete tobacco usage bans, limiting “unhealthy food availability” (the really bad stuff like “whole milk, sugar sweetened beverages, high-fat snacks”), and of course taxes (or in CDC lingo: “changing relative prices of healthy vs. unhealthy items”).

A supplemental document explains in more detail what the targets are, including restricting availability of soft drinks “in homes, schools, work sites, and communities.”

(more…)