https://www.city-journal.org/article/make-america-responsible-again
For several months, a telehealth company, Hims & Hers, has run full-page ads about obesity in the New York Times. The ads promote the idea that obesity is a medical condition that can be eradicated only with Ozempic and other new obesity drugs. They go on to demand insurance coverage for those drugs. The Sunday, November 17, Hims & Hers ad complained that “access to effective treatment” for extreme obesity “remains out of reach for many,” unlike treatments for breast cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and HIV. “It’s time to change that,” concludes the pitch.
The Hims & Hers argument—that obesity is a genetic disorder like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, largely outside the control of its victims—may be self-interested, but it has also been the position of the public-health industry for years. We are to believe that the sharp rise of obesity in the U.S. over the last several decades is due to genetic changes in Americans’ susceptibility to weight gain. To portray obesity as something brought on by behavior—overeating and under exercising—is to blame the victim and to commit “fat-shaming.” This insistence that being overweight is outside individual control is driven in considerable part by racial considerations, since black females are disproportionately overweight. But the rule against invoking personal responsibility is also part of a larger elite mindset. By medicalizing behavioral issues, the elites transfer power from the individual to themselves, the dispensers of technocratic responses to social problems.
It is absurd, however, to claim that Americans’ genes have changed in the last half century in such a way as to make Americans gain weight. (The same fallacy applies to the equally fat Brits.) Genes takes centuries, not decades, to change. The recent alteration in the Anglosphere’s diet and lifestyle is massive and obvious, however: snacking throughout the day, a diet of highly sweetened processed foods, and a lack of exercise or even of merely walking modest distances. Members of gyms wait several minutes for the gym elevator to arrive rather than walking up one flight of stairs, even though they are presumably there to burn calories, rather than merely to take advantage the gym’s inevitable snack-food vending machines.
