Last night The Charlie Rose Show featured a panel on obesity and nutrition that read like a who’s who of food cops, including anti-food-industry fanatics Marion Nestle and Dr. David Ludwig. While Nestle has devoted most of her career to singularly blaming the food industry for the nation’s weight, on the show she criticized one-size-fits-all approaches to obesity:
I once made a list of all of the factors that I could find that influence body weight and I gave up at 50. There were at least 50 different factors … the most amazing collection of things, each one of which at some point has been proposed as the magic solution.
Nestle was not alone in her contradictory rhetoric. Ludwig wasted no time in advocating bureaucratic regulations over the nation’s food supply by "working to create political will to put public health over short term private profit." But minutes later — when asked where interventions should focus — Ludwig pointed to parents, not food companies, as the definitive arbitrators of children’s diets:
You can say "no" once to your kids when they ask you for that ice cream half gallon in the supermarket or you can try to say "no" every night when they beg you for it.
