“Too Fat To Fight”: Is Obesity a National Security Threat?

According to the military, yes.

The Associated Press reports that 27 percent of all young adults–that’s more than 9 million Americans ages 17 to 24–are too overweight to enlist in the military.

As I covered in my piece on the sustainable food movement, the Department of Defense is intimately linked with the National School Lunch Program administered by the United States Department of Agriculture. The irony of the USDA’s lunch program is this: It was started in 1946 in response to DOD complaints that recruits were malnourished and too skinny; now the complaint is that recruits are too fat and can’t even run a mile. So there’s a push to reform the system and spend the funds necessary to provide the DOD with what it needs: skinnier, healthier recruits.

I often have mixed feelings on “national security issues,” how it’s used sometimes to justify highly questionable government actions. But if the DOD can get Congress to change our insane school-nutrition policies, I can certainly get behind that.

Now if they could just get Congress to yank the USDA out of the school lunch program (now there’s a conflict of interests!) and assign it to a different agency…

['Too Fat' for Empire? Military Generals Target School Lunches | CommonDreams.org]

UPDATE: I stumbled upon this post on Gawker, which reports that a lawsuit has been filed against Marine Corps recruiters, alleging that they caused the death of an overweight 22-year-old by forcing him to wear a “plastic suit” and work out in 100-degree-plus temperatures in order to lose weight. Gawker reports:

According to his medical records, Daniel had been found unconscious at the gym, wrapped in a plastic bag and scuba diving gear (for “better sweating”) and had been taking diet pills and diuretics to “aggressively lose weight.”

Would You Buy Fire Insurance From An Arsonist?

Yeah, same here.

So why, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health, are insurance companies investing close to $2 billion in the fast-food industry? Why are the same companies that are selling us life, disability and health insurance simultaneously placing their bets on the very thing — cheap, unhealthy food — most likely to make us die sooner, or suffer a disability like diabetes, or rack up massive bills in healthcare?

I already mentioned the study in my piece about the sustainable food movement, but it’s worthy of further press because it exposes yet another example of corporate irresponsibility run amok in a casino economy, of money-making schemes that are playing both sides of a transaction. First, there was the “great vampire squid“–er, I mean Goldman Sachs–making a fortune by betting against the same toxic crap assets it sold to investors. Then came the news that regulators had approved the creation of a futures market for movie box office receipts, which even Hollywood slams as “an online gaming platform that could be easily manipulated”–Hollywood must remember the plot line of “The Producers,” after all.

And now this from the insurance industry, which is fretting about profits in a post-healthcare-reform world, no doubt. Their investments in fast food seem counterintuitive, at first. But if you channel the spirit of Leo Bloom, it makes perfect sense: If you can’t sustain your profits by keeping people healthy, then sustain your profits by making people sick.

What Newspapers Can Learn From Big Tobacco

First my disclaimer: I consider the tactics used by Big Tobacco to be, at best, manipulative, at worst diabolical. Nothing I’m about to say should be considered an endorsement of that industry.

But in the face of declining cigarette sales, they are doing something that newspapers are not: innovating.

For example, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco is test-marketing a new product, called Camel Orbs, that looks fiendishly similar to Tic Tac breath mints. (You can read about it in today’s New York Times.) They’ve also launched other dissolvable nicotine products such as Camel Strips — I’d imagine they work something like those Listerine breath strips so many love — that are getting slammed in a new study being released by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health.

See how they do? How they’re adapting their business model? In response to anti-smoking ordinances and the rising stigmatization of cigarette smokers, they’re devising ingenious new ways to deliver nicotine to consumers, not just clinging to their rapidly declining signature product, the cigarette. They are finding ways to hook a new generation of consumers, not just bemoaning the loss of  the ones who are dying off. In short, Big Tobacco is showing considerable wile, and staying nimble.

So why is the news industry so flat-footed in the face of a similarly declining signature product and an aging/terminal consumer base? Journalism is crucial; newspapers are not. Information is the real drug — I speak from personal experience, here — just like nicotine. So find ingenious new ways to deliver that drug, and get people hooked.

As for paywalls and such, I can’t help thinking, there’s a reason dealers give you sh*t for free. And dealers know that customers don’t just start with the premium sh*t straight away, usually: You have to get them hooked on the cheap/free stuff first.  I’ve heard the NYT plans to give 10 articles for free before the paywall blocks access, but I think that could work against them. If I only get 10 per month, or whatever, I’m going to have to ask myself with each and every article, “Is this article worth spending one of my precious ten free credits?” That kind of cognitive work, that weighing of lost opportunity costs, is often enough to drive away potential customers. I don’t know what the NYT plans on charging for stuff behind the paywall, but as Chris Anderson points out in his book, “Free: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Profit By Giving Something for Nothing,” (which, btw, is available on iTunes as a free audiobook) the gap between free and one penny is enormous. Studies show that just asking people to pay one penny for something is enough to make them turn it down entirely.

So learn something from Big Tobacco, news industry. Maybe, then, things could be as the voice promised in the movie “Field of Dreams”: If you build it, they will come.

Good god, I hope so. Because I may just be a fledgling journalist today, but I’m working really hard at honing my bat. And one day, I want  my chance to play ball, too…