Mississippi wants you to slim down, or else not eat at all

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LemonMelon

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http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0201081fat1.html

Mississippi Pols Seek To Ban Fats
New bill would make it illegal for restaurants to serve the obese


FEBRUARY 1--Mississippi legislators this week introduced a bill that would make it illegal for state-licensed restaurants to serve obese patrons. Bill No. 282, a copy of which you'll find below, is the brainchild of three members of the state's House of Representatives, Republicans W. T. Mayhall, Jr. and John Read, and Democrat Bobby Shows. The bill, which is likely dead on arrival, proposes that the state's Department of Health establish weight criteria after consultation with Mississippi's Council on Obesity. It does not detail what penalties an eatery would face if its grub was served to someone with an excessive body mass index.

0201081fat1no8.gif


What a world. :slant:
 
If that bill wasn't "likely dead on arrival," I wouldn't know what to think.
 
How ridiculous! Yes, obesity is a problem, but what the Mississippi pols are suggesting is basically discrimination.
 
:lmao: Yeah only an MS politician would come up with something like that.

Well, Mississippi is neck-and-neck with West Virginia for highest obesity rates in the country (Colorado and Utah have the lowest rates, in case you're wondering--though even theirs are frighteningly high), so it is a critical public health problem there. It's a vicious circle--it's the poorest state in the country, and poverty is (in the US at least) strongly correlated with obesity, yet at the same time, that also means it's the least prepared to mount large-scale public health initiatives (not to mention cope with the surge in Type II diabetes, which is also epidemic there now).

Not the way to go about it though.
 
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Come on! I want my money's worth. When I eat out I generally take home enough food for my next three meals!
 
Maybe if Mississippi was serious about people losing weight, the state would shorten its name. Set an example that less is more.

A rare FYM post for moi, and the locals think to themselves "Thank g-d it's rare".
 
Maybe Huckabee could make reading from his weight-loss book the centerpiece of his campaigning in Mississippi...if he's even going to campaign in Mississippi, that is.
 
yolland said:
:lmao: Yeah only an MS politician would come up with something like that.

Well, Mississippi is neck-and-neck with West Virginia for highest obesity rates in the country (Colorado and Utah have the lowest rates, in case you're wondering--though even theirs are frighteningly high), so it is a critical public health problem there. It's a vicious circle--it's the poorest state in the country, and poverty is (in the US at least) strongly correlated with obesity, yet at the same time, that also means it's the least prepared to mount large-scale public health initiatives (not to mention cope with the surge in Type II diabetes, which is also epidemic there now).

Not the way to go about it though.

The correlation is also seen in Germany, and a recent study has published figures that break the obesity rates down to social level and education, which again is correlated with each other.
So, if you are poor, you are very likely to get a shitty education, and become obese. The perspecitve to get out of that once you are in the cycle is decreasing.

Certainly an interesting approach, and very unique one, in Mississippi. :D
 
It is true that crappy food is cheap.

But fruits and veggies are even cheaper, it's just that people don't want to be eating them when they can gobble up a box of mac 'n cheese with little effort.

I can only speak for myself. Anytime I got to size 8, I was bothered enough to go back to the gym 7 days a week. The average size in the US for women is something like a 12 or 14, dear God. But it just goes to show that government mandates are useless. You have to want to change your entire lifestyle and until that moment comes, you'll be obese.
 
Vincent Vega said:


The correlation is also seen in Germany, and a recent study has published figures that break the obesity rates down to social level and education, which again is correlated with each other.
So, if you are poor, you are very likely to get a shitty education, and become obese. The perspecitve to get out of that once you are in the cycle is decreasing.

Certainly an interesting approach, and very unique one, in Mississippi. :D

Have you seen Harald Schmidt yesterday? :rolleyes:
 
It's not just a question of poor food budgeting, though that's unquestionably part of it. MS is overwhelmingly rural, and an awful lot of Mississippians don't have easy access to a nice well-stocked Winn-Dixie or Kroger or other 'supermarket' (let alone a gym or health club). When my parents moved to the little town I grew up in back in '61, there were two tiny grocers (one for black people and one for white people, in those days) which sold pretty much only pantry staples (flour, oil, spices, sugar, bread, rice, beans), meat, milk, and eggs. Neither sold produce, except maybe potatoes and apples--it was just taken for grated that everyone grew their own. By the time I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, there was an obvious generational divide between people over fifty, who devoted every square inch of their backyard to vegetable gardening, and people under fifty, who didn't know how to garden or considered it too time-consuming. There still weren't (and still aren't) any supermarkets; if you had a car (which a lot of people there don't) then maybe you drove to the county seat a couple times a month to stock up at the supermarket or farmer's market, but otherwise you were limited to a handful of "mini-marts" selling an abbreviated range of what the former grocers used to stock--plus a LOT of 'convenience' foods and junk foods that wouldn't have been widely available at all before the '80s. (And a large array of alcoholic beverages and cigarettes, of course.) Combine that with the (related) declines in cooking skills and exercise--people aren't working in the fields anymore, they're sitting at a conveyor belt packaging catfish for export to other regions since the locals can no longer afford it--and you have a pretty good portrait of an unhealthy lifestyle. And like Vincent said, poor education (guess who also has the worst schools in the country?) only furthers the cycle.

Obviously there are also plenty of obese Mississippians who could easily afford to base their diets on produce and healthy staples from local supermarkets; I wouldn't want to exaggerate the effects of poor access. But it's one more example of how impoverishment hurts people's ability to take care of themselves.
 
I think this is an interesting idea, not saying it's a great one but given the huge probably obesity presents, something needs to be done. If at some point, the US goes to a single payer universal health care system, then I think ideas like this will become more popular in order to keep taxes ands costs down.
 
yolland said:
Combine that with the (related) declines in cooking skills and exercise--people aren't working in the fields anymore, they're sitting at a conveyor belt packaging catfish for export to other regions since the locals can no longer afford it--and you have a pretty good portrait of an unhealthy lifestyle.



this really strikes me as a goodly portion of the problem, especially whenever Memphis talks about his family, and how his grandparents lived. they were farmers. every morning they'd get up, grandpa would go to the fields, and grandma would go to the kitchen. she would proceed to bake 300 biscuits, put them in a large sack, and then haul them up to the field. the men would eat. then go back to work. she'd go back to the kitchen. then she'd prepare a lunch. which she'd bring back up to the field. the men would have lunch. she'd go back to the kitchen and prepare dinner which would be eaten at the dinner table since work stopped when it got dark out. dinner would be fried chicken, probably, potatoes, cornbread, stuff like that. it's all delicious, and deadly, but those are calories you burn when your life is spent outside.

i've seen tons of old family movies taken in the 60s and 70s, and *no one* is overweight in those videos. flash forward to present day. i've been to his family reuinion, and i'd say well over half the people there are overweight with a good third of them obese. the food hasn't changed at all. but the lifestyle -- working at the bank, at a store, at FedEx -- certainly has.
 
Irvine511 said:

i've seen tons of old family movies taken in the 60s and 70s, and *no one* is overweight in those videos. flash forward to present day. i've been to his family reuinion, and i'd say well over half the people there are overweight with a good third of them obese. the food hasn't changed at all. but the lifestyle -- working at the bank, at a store, at FedEx

Exactly, but that is precisely the point. In order to live healthy these days, you have to overhaul your entire lifestyle. You have to think about every piece of food you put in your mouth, you have to think about your activity level, you have to think about what you can substitute so that you aren't eating high-calorie foods, you have to expand your horizons to foods that you or your family hadn't necessarily been eating, but are great for you, and so on.
 
That's why I miss college, lol. I was too poor to eat too much and even if I did it didn't matter because I spent 2/3 of my waking hours walking (mostly to/from work and school, but also for my job while I was working). Now, it really has become something that I have to schedule in b/c my job requires me at my desk allllll day every day. During school it was go-go-go 5 days a week and then rest or do book work on the weekends; now it's sit-sit-sit for 5 days and then force self to get off ass all weekend. Everyone should have lots of dogs! They are great motivators for getting out and being active :D I was in Chicago this past weekend and I realized how much I actually miss having no choice but to walk everywhere.

OK, time for my hour on the elliptical...
 
U2democrat said:

My dinner tonight is Poptart splitz, half blueberry half strawberry :cute:

I don't even want to imagine what that is.
 
How many of those do you have to eat to actually make a dinner?
 
For the average person I don't know, but it doesn't take much to fill me up and I wasn't very hungry in the first place tonight so 2.

They shouldn't make a dinner, but they're what I have :shrug:
 
^ :tsk: That's not the way to get over a flu quickly, young lady...
Irvine511 said:
this really strikes me as a goodly portion of the problem, especially whenever Memphis talks about his family, and how his grandparents lived. they were farmers. every morning they'd get up, grandpa would go to the fields, and grandma would go to the kitchen. she would proceed to bake 300 biscuits, put them in a large sack, and then haul them up to the field. the men would eat. then go back to work. she'd go back to the kitchen. then she'd prepare a lunch. which she'd bring back up to the field. the men would have lunch. she'd go back to the kitchen and prepare dinner which would be eaten at the dinner table since work stopped when it got dark out. dinner would be fried chicken, probably, potatoes, cornbread, stuff like that. it's all delicious, and deadly, but those are calories you burn when your life is spent outside.

i've seen tons of old family movies taken in the 60s and 70s, and *no one* is overweight in those videos. flash forward to present day. i've been to his family reuinion, and i'd say well over half the people there are overweight with a good third of them obese. the food hasn't changed at all. but the lifestyle -- working at the bank, at a store, at FedEx -- certainly has.
300?!? Were they sharecroppers, or was this just a really huge family farm?

A friend of mine from Itta Bena who still lives in the area is now a nurse-dietician (I think that's her title) and she hears these kinds of stories all the time. But older people do also bemoan to her how much fewer vegetables everyone eats nowadays, and how much more junk food (i.e. what in the 'old days' would've been Sunday-only treats--cookies, soda, doughnuts, candy etc.). So I do think the nutritional balance of a lot of folks' diets is also worse in ways that go beyond just excessive calories--fewer nutrients, higher proportions of saturated fat and sugar, and lots of refined carbohydrates that send your insulin soaring and make you even hungrier. She says that especially with poorer clients, it's very difficult to get them to make effective dietary changes--partly because of poor access to the kinds of foods she'd ideally like to see them eat more of, partly because they're not accustomed to following written recipes which is often a helpful tool with other clients, and partly because they tend to live in communities where no one else cares much about fitness, so there's little positive reinforcement.
 
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I don't think the State will be able to do this

but the estate can


Estate planning lawyer Jon Gallo says about a quarter of his clients have asked him about incentive plans. He says sometimes getting money is contingent on a college degree, marrying a person of a particular faith, earning a certain amount of money -- and it gets a lot weirder:

Jon Gallo: I'm aware of one incentive trust in which the beneficiary's weight was taken into consideration. If she weighed more than a specified amount, the income from the trust would be cut back, because her father was always concerned that she was going to be obese.

Seriously? Is that even legal?

yes.
 
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