16 May The Real Disease is Called Government
May 16, 2005
By Tom DeWeese
The DeWeese Report has reported many times of the outrageous campaign to control what we eat. Obesity has become the tobacco of the day as trial lawyers line up to file class action suits to make restaurants responsible if you get fat. Schools have rushed to empty anything good out of the school cafeteria while practically force-feeding tofu to our poor, oppressed kids. Obesity has been ranked as the number two preventable death, right behind smoking. The nation is in a panic. Americans are too fat, moan the food police. The government has to do something, cries the herd.
Now comes a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), that a mistake was made in the estimates on obesity-related deaths. It seems that the original estimate of 365,000 per year (corrected in July from 400,000) is really only 25,814. Oops!
25,814 is not a national crisis. It’s barely a bump on the road. It’s less than the number of people killed in auto accidents or by gun shot wounds. There simply is no obesity crisis in this country.
What we have are lies, lawyers and fraud. Obesity is the disease of the day – even if it’s just a fabrication. Even with its own report, the CDC refuses to change its public awareness campaigns. It intends to keep right on scaring the fat cells out of you. There are too many federal grants to be gained to tell the truth now. And the lawyers intend to ignore the report as well. Money is money.
The truth is, as reported by The Center for Consumer Freedom, in 1998, the federal government changed the rules measuring the Body Mass Index (BMI). Overnight, 30 million Americans, without gaining a pound, went from normal BMI to overweight. Now, Tom Cruise, Michael Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, and even Arnold Schwarzenegger are listed as obese. It’s a lie. There is no obesity epidemic. There is only the disease of government run by overweight, droopy-joweled bureaucrats, fat-headed special interest groups hoping to feed at the federal trough, and lawyers.
Tom DeWeese is the publisher/editor of The DeWeese Report and president of the American Policy Center, a grassroots activist think tank headquartered in Warrenton, VA. The Center maintains a website at www.americanpolicy.org.
