The World Health Organization has released a lovely little report on the effects of economic deregulation on the consumption of fast food and the average Body Mass Index (BMI) of citizens. To the surprise of no one, the nutrition police are celebrating the findings that more freedom leads to more food and higher BMI as evidence both for the evils of McDonald’s and of capitalism itself.
Of course, to rational people, the result should exactly the opposite reaction. Far from being a blight on world health, economic freedom should be praised for the fact that it allows such abundance to flourish in a world that was once defined by poverty and starvation. Fast food, as its detractors are swift to point out, is quick, cheap and high-calorie. The only world in which these could possibly be considered bad qualities is the upside down land of privilege inhabited by rich liberals.
There are very few places in the world where the primary health concern is that people have too much to eat. For the vast majority of humanity, the cornucopia of affordable options provided by a free economy would be a welcome relief from the privation still characteristic of so much of the planet. Still, those of us fortunate enough to live in the First World are continually harassed, harangued and chastised for our eating habits, in what has come to be called “the obesity epidemic.”
The prevalence of fast food is nothing more than an additional option on the menu of consumer products. No one is forced to eat it if they don’t want to, but the choice is there, and more choice is always a good thing.
If people choose to eat more fast food because they like the taste or because they do not want to spend extra money on organic, farm-raised, gluten-free meals at exorbitant prices, who are we to condemn them? The argument goes that, since government subsidizes so much health-care, we all have an interest in promoting good health, but social welfare programs should not be an excuse to run other people’s lives. The problem with allowing other people to foot the bill for our medical problems is that sooner or later, they’re going to try to cut costs by telling us what to do.
Finally, it should be mentioned that the statistic used here as a proxy for health, BMI, is so grossly flawed that it’s a wonder anyone is still able to take it seriously. BMI essentially boils down to a ratio of a person’s weight to their height. If the ratio exceeds a certain threshold, the person deemed overweight or obese, and hence unhealthy. The problems with this should be immediately evident to anyone familiar with human variability. First of all, muscle tends to weigh quite a lot. For this reason, BMI tends to classify athletes and movie stars as overweight when they are clearly not due to the high muscle content of their bodies.
Secondly, there is an increasing body of evidence that weight itself is not that good of an indicator of overall health. Many people have naturally large frames in can actually make themselves less healthy by trying to become thinner than their natural weight.
If economic freedom leads to more fast food and more well-fed citizens, all I can say is “Good!” We should celebrate the ways in which capitalism has allowed food production to expand in such a dramatic way that most of the western world has more food than we know what to do with. Perhaps if we applied the same model to developing countries there would be less starvation and famine, and more burgers and fries for everyone.