Food For Thought

For the past few years, Mrs. TBF has had to endure my sermons regarding how I would solve America's health care issues. Ok... maybe my idea of an annual weigh-in and a "fat tax" is a bit... um... extreme.

Let's scratch that one.

However, a much simpler approach which most Americans could (but are for the most part unwilling to) do is... Ready for this????

LOSE WEIGHT!!!!!!**

Losing weight would cut down on type 2 diabetes, knee operations, back problems, unnecessary tests, etc. Plus the money one would save on food could go toward purchasing that shiny new car, big screen TV, or straight into the savings account.

Yeah, sure! Like people would actually put the money into savings. Right!

The benefit of that would be that the sales tax on non-food items is much higher than it is on groceries, and that would result in more money going into government coffers. Which, in turn, could go into health care (which people would now be requiring less of).

See? I told you I had it all figured out.

Anyway...

I saw this little letter to the editor in The Economist yesterday:

SIR - Some of the expense of health care derives from Americans' diet and sedentary lifestyle. We have the highest percentage of overweight and obese patients in the industrialized world. One-third of Americans are obese; that is 50% more than the British, 100% more than the Germans and 250% more than the French. The cost of treating obese patients rises as their body mass index increases.
Obesity lessens life expectancy more than smoking. I would like to see Europe's health-care costs with the same levels of obesity.
DR. ARTURO BONNIN
Dayton, Ohio

See? I've been saying it all along!

**I'd also like to take this moment to remind people that you don't loose weight, but instead, you lose weight.

loose vs. lose