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OPINIONS
Editorial: Fight against obesity begins with personal choices
Let's be blunt. West Virginia has a lot of fat people. So do Ohio and Kentucky.
If you're not fat, you may have extra weight hanging over your belt or on your hips. It's a fact of life in this area that most adults are heavier than they need to be.
Children, too. Look around and ask yourself if today's kids aren't heavier than those of a generation ago.
This is one area in which you can say that West Virginia led the nation, and now the rest of the country is catching up. It's why the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously this week to impose a one-year moratorium on new fast food restaurants in a 32-square-mile area of South Los Angeles. Council members justified their action by pointing to the fact that the area's 500,000 residents, mostly Hispanic and African American, suffer from higher-than-average obesity.
Closer to home, schools have banned soft drinks from vending machines, and they are encouraging children to eat healthier meals in the cafeteria.
According to a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 29.5 percent of West Virginians are considered obese. That was the fifth-highest percentage among the states and within less than a percentage point of being the second highest.
"Portion control's the biggest issue for most people," Jenna Rose, nutrition coordinator at the Woman, Infants and Children (WIC) program office in Huntington, told The Herald-Dispatch reporter Laura Wilcox.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture dietary guidelines, most Americans need to eat fewer calories and be more active to reverse the trend toward obesity. For most adults, reducing 50 to 100 calories each day can prevent gradual weight gain. Reducing 500 calories per day could lead to gradual weight loss, according to the International Food Information Council.
A person can quickly reach 2,000 calories in a day, though, especially when eating out.
"Fast food restaurants are notorious for the calories," Rose said. "Before you know it, you've got 600 or 700 calories in one meal."
Now we're back to fast food.
The American lifestyle has changed in a generation or two. We don't move around as much, and we have access to more high-fat, high-calorie food. So many of us are doing so many things that it's easier to hit the drive-up window than to prepare meals at home ahead of time and put them in the refrigerator.
And there is a reason soft drinks and snack foods occupy about as much shelf space at the grocery store as fruits, vegetables and other healthy foods.
Which brings us to the question of what should be public -- read that as "government" -- policy toward food, portion size and healthy eating?
Maybe the government needs to use the same heavy-handed tactics it did with smoking. Maybe it needs to tax nonessential, high-fat, high-sugar foods mercilessly to drive down their use.
In the end, however, government can do all it wants, but it still comes down to individual choices on what we eat and drink. When it comes to food, there's only so much government and others involved in public policy can do to protect us from ourselves.
Already some employers charge higher health insurance premiums to employees who smoke. Can similar surcharges for bad eating habits or being overweight be far behind?
The crusades against smoking and driving while intoxicated may offer some guidance, but it could be more like the anti-litter effort of the past 45 years. Some people got the message, while some people still throw their trash along the road.
Calories, portion sizes and the like are all individual decisions. Government and insurers can do what they want, but we'll remain overweight until we make the conscious decision to change our personal habits.
