Things I didn’t know, from Matt Steinglass at Accumulating Peripherals:

…Ah, but there’s no way for society to intervene to make a purposive change in those sorts of things! Except of course for how public anti-smoking campaigns and taxes have slashed the rate of smoking to less than half what it was in 1965. Was that “in the realm of the individual”? Or how when France instituted a nationwide campaign to stop the rising rate of child obesity through school-based monitoring and exercise and diet interventions, it, well, stopped the rising rate of child obesity. At a level less than 1/4 that in the US.

Scotland is adopting the French small-town anti-obesity program, known as EPODE. But we can’t do that because…what’s the conservative/libertarian argument again? That Americans are stupider, less disciplined and naturally fatter than French people? Or something?

Posted by Jerome Doolittle at October 14, 2009 11:51 AM

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