The 9/11 Commission Report claimed that the government’s greatest weakness was a "failure to imagine." But now it seems that one federal panel may have overcorrected when taking that message to heart. Today, the President’s Cancer Panel released a new report that elevates the battle of the bulge to a righteous struggle between good and evil. (No lack of imagination there.)
The report claims that the government has a "moral obligation" to fight against the food and beverage industries "that are at the core of so much of the cancer and other chronic diseases that are sickening and killing Americans by the hundreds of thousands each year." It goes on to define the food industry as a "necessary evil" in many parts of modern society. And concludes by outlining a litany of freedom-killing proposals to tax, regulate, and litigate away individual choice in food and drink.
But before policymakers push for the Council’s "greater efforts to address the obesity issue through legislation and policy," they should take a close look at the panel’s participants. Trial lawyer Richard Daynard — a board member of the Public Health Advocacy Institute, which has a history of filing obesity-related lawsuits against restaurants and food companies — told the panel he wanted to "protect" Americans from the food industry. And another panel member, David Heber, was discredited as an obesity "expert" in 2003 when Forbes magazine uncovered his financial ties to the weight-loss industry.
