Schaff: Our sweet tooth — a regulatory dilemma

The whole idea of government is to nosy it up in people’s affairs. Usually, the controversy is… The whole idea of government is to nosy it up in people’s affairs. Usually, the controversy is about what affairs and how nosy. Today, it’s about sugar.

In the February edition of the esteemed science journal Nature, a group of California researchers advocated for aggressive government intervention in the food market, particularly when it comes to a special ingredient: sugar. Drawing from a variety of studies that suggest a causal link between the recent ascendancy of fructose-laden processed food and rising rates of obesity and metabolic disease, both of which cost the United States huge sums each year, the authors propose making sugary foods less accessible, either by way of substantial taxes or physical relocation (i.e., taking soft drinks out of schools).

Cases don’t often close that quickly, and the sugar regulation question is no different. That’s because not everyone is in lock-step agreement — as if on cue, industry groups are already starting to shake their heads. Whichever side wins, a decision will have to be made some day. Surely, if the authors’ lines of causality between fructose and obesity are valid, there’s reason to build a society that dances fewer deliciously lethal calories in front of consumers. But even still, implementing the proposed reforms — which, by the way, have been suggested before — would place the U.S. government in an unprecedented place, and I believe such a decision should come only after a careful evaluation of how far we want to engineer our fellow Americans’ ingestive behaviors.

Although they would never frame it this way for fear of losing an election, public executives and lawmakers go to work in the morning to pursue one common goal: behavioral engineering. Now that might strike you as Stalinistic and therefore inapplicable to the American model, but you’d only be half right — the first half. By definition, whomever fate happens to place in a governing position — be it a dictator or the denizens themselves — commands control over the infinite set of possible human behaviors, as the ruling body can encourage certain behaviors and discourage others. The alternative, which one could call the ideal “free market,” is no different than chaos.

Whereas physically intact people over the age of 10 are capable of pressing a pedal and turning a wheel and cars are capable of traveling at any speed up to 120 miles per hour, governments nevertheless encourage driving with a license and discourage reckless speeding, each producing visible results in human behavior. So whenever you see governments raising local property tax revenue to pay teachers, pushing money toward pet projects or implementing health care reform, they’re doing it because they have an idea as to how people in society should behave. And such societal ideals, when they’re turned into laws and then followed, have consequences on what we do.

One of the things we do regularly is put stuff in our bodies. As anyone who survived the D.A.R.E. program can attest, these “input” behaviors (which include ingestion, inhalation and injection) have in recent history been subject to rigorous governmental engineering. This area of control, in particular, engenders ubiquitous, heartfelt disagreement. From disgruntled Pittsburgh smokers struggling to enjoy bar-going to party-frenzied freshmen decrying the drinking age to a misguided Michele Bachmann blaming required newborn immunizations for autism, regulation of input behaviors ruffles feathers far and wide.

It’s the government-led engineering of sugar-eating habits that I believe could lead to even more of a stir. Sure, sugar might share a lot of the risks that qualify tobacco and alcohol for regulation — a potential for abuse, toxicity in certain quantities and a negative impact on society. But there’s a crucial difference. Sugar, in some quantity, is a nutrient; eating it can literally add something constructive to the body. Smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol will not (unless you want to venture into a hazy discussion of subjective effects or define alcohol exclusively as red wine. As a society, we’ve apparently already deemed it appropriate for government to discourage potentially harmful input behaviors that offer no nutritive value — take the federal cigarette tax or the Allegheny County alcohol tax, for two examples. But the idea of selecting items out of the grocery list for similar discouragement threatens to take behavioral engineering to an arguably unsavory level, one that could compromise a traditionally prized American value: freedom of choice. An excise tax might reduce average sugar consumption to some social optimum whereby obesity levels are controlled. But at the same time the tax punishes all sugar consumers, even those  who make good dietary decisions on the whole but don’t mind a Coca-Cola here or there.

No doubt, reversing the obesity epidemic would quell a lot of American suffering, but before we sign on to wide-scale government intervention in the food market, Americans need to do some soul searching.

Write Matt Schaff at matthew.schaff@gmail.com.