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Japan Imposes "Fine On Fat"
An anonymous reader writes "A recently-introduced law in Japan requires all businesses to have mandatory obesity checks (video link) for all their employees and employees' family members over the age of 40, CNN reports. If the employee or family member is deemed obese, and does not lose the extra fat soon, their employer faces large fines. The legislated upper limit for the waistline is 33.5" for men, and 35.5" for women. Should America adopt universal health insurance, could we live to see the same kind of individual health regulations imposed on us by the government? By comparison, the average waistline in America in 2005 was 39 inches for men, 37 inches for women."
Does this apply to foreign workers? For instance, if I were to go work in Japan for a year or two after I'm 40, would my employer be fined if I didn't shrink my 37 to a 33.5?
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
How can you have a single upper-limit on waist sizes? Are all people in Japan the same height or are short people allowed to be fatter than tall ones?
And how is the employer really responsible for their employees' weight? OK sure, there's going to be a bit of correllation between the general health attitude at your job and your own weight and from what I understand there's more of a culture for this thing in Japan but it still seems like a big leap to make in what a company is responsible for and subsequently what an employee has to answer to his employer about. Can constantly fat people be fired for costing their company too much in fines?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
I never understood why this was so unpopular. We tax the beejebus out of cigarretes because it is an easy way for politicians to raise taxes without making everyone mad. Eating tons of junk food over the course of your life isnt much better than smoking a pack a day.
I'm not saying I support a tax on junk food, but I cant see how people can support taxing lower income folks who go through a pack a day but not this.
Increasing the cost of obesity reduces obesity. We don't know how much it would, but studies from cigarette taxes show that increases costs decrease consumption of even highly desirable things.
Obesity increases fuel consumption -- the obese eat more (more food transport and production fuel use) and weigh more (more transport costs in themselves). They eat 18% more, according the Lancet. The Lancet goes on to suggest that reducing obesity would reduce global warming.
And yes, their health care costs us -- we should be getting some of that back.
A small tax (in stores, vending machines and restaurants) on foods which digest quickly seems like a FANTASTIC idea. Not a big deal for someone that eats a few Snickers bars every month, but a noticeable pain for someone who eats them every day.
Surely that counts out virtually most athletes in sports such as Weightlifting, Rugby Union, Shotput, Discus and many many more sports in which the atheletes are likely to be semi pro and have to have a 9 - 5 to help support themselves financially. Let alone Sumo Wrestling which is what football is to us Brits! Thats real football by the way to all you yanks :-p. You can be very healthy and very muscular and have a waist well above 33.5, I know a guy whose a semi professional Rugby Union player who has a 42 inch waist and a 55 inch chest, and is fitter than 99% of people on the street! It should be done on proper BMI (Body Mass Index), not including just height and weight as most do, but a real BMI includes skin fold measurements and takes into account percentage body fat and needs to be carried out by a qualified professional for the results to be accurate. If your gonna introduce a law which has monetary fines attatched to it at least make it fair!
You'd have to send him to Japan first, which would be prohibitively expensive.
I'm more interested in what this does for Sumo wrestlers. Will they now be fired unless they go on a diet?
Most countries with national health programs (mine included) don't have any restrictions on what you can do, eat, smoke, shoot up, jump off of or have sex with. As you point out, one country where the system does generally involve penalties for certain behaviour or conditions is the private system in the US.
Shaquille O'Neil is not exactly fat at 7'1" and 325, but he has a BMI of 31.6 -- well into the "obese" range. A 5'2" woman would have to weigh 173 pounds to have the same BMI as Shaq -- and I know damn well that 173 and 5'2 is rolling fat.
So tell us how useful the BMI is as a gauge of obesity again.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
You say "good genes". I say: "bad math". Body fat is subject to the universal laws of thermodynamics. If you decrease your calorie consumption, you will have less energy left over to store as fat. The overall trend in the USA (or probably all of the western world) is towards unhealthy diets. I have what might be called a "superfood" diet and hover at a trim 30-32" waist size, even with what I must admit is too little exercise. I sport a six-pack and ripped muscles--its all diet. I'm down from about a 36" waist from when I realized I was getting too old for a 20-something diet full of pizza and cheeseburgers. Since beginning my superfood diet (approximately 50% of calories by fruit, 30% by legumes and nuts, 10% by grain, 10% by dairy), I have noticed that the healthy foods I choose have been systematically replaced in the grocery store by less healthy alternatives. For example, at my local Albertson's, whole grain cereals have been replaced by boxes of sugar-coated junk. "Regular" juice is replaced by "pulp free". Etc. Etc. Start a healthy diet and track the availability of the healthy foods you eat in the grocery store. You will see that your choices deteriorate over time. Soon you have to switch to "healthy" stores with elevated prices. Rather than tax employers, the state should tax unhealthy food alternatives. The cost of the unhealthy diet will be passed to the directly to the consumer where it belongs. To save money, people will switch to healthier alternatives that cost less. Right now, the most expensive foods in terms of cost per calorie, are the most healthy foods.
Just callin' it like I see it.
You choose to have an unhealthy lifestyle, and thus there are incentives to encourage you to change.
Last I checked, I have very little control over my genetic code (still trying to invent that time machine so I can kill my father before I was born...)
That said, I'm rather unhappy that as a moderate consumer of alcohol, my insurance could group me with binge drinkers and charge me more money, even though there's evidence that moderate drinkers are healthier than non-drinkers. Who gets to decide what's science and what's not?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
If we are going to take this route, let's at least do it right.
The point is to penalize unhealthy people, correct? There are studies which show pretty conclusively that the healthiest people are the ones which are slightly over the 'ideal' weight. Folks carrying a bit of extra weight (read: normal) live longer than folks who maintain that beautiful body that TV insists you should have.
So, let's penalize the thin people too. If their lifestyle is as unhealthy as the fat folks, why exempt them?
The problem isn't cost. Rice, beans, veggies, flour, sugar, a garden, etc... are dirt cheap. Even the best value meals at the cheapest fast food restaurants or packets of noodle soups won't undercut cooking from scratch.
:-D
The problem is time.
When you eat slowly, you tend to eat less.
When you're well rested, you tend to eat less.
When you cook meals to eat when you are hungry, instead of waiting until you are very hungry, you tend to eat less.
Cooking food takes time.
Cleaning up your dishes between meals takes time.
Cheap fresh produce doesn't stay edible as long as processed goods, so you have to shop more often. That takes time.
And of course, there's physical activity. An exercise routine (with a shower after each workout) takes time too. It's also harder to motivate yourself to exercise when you're dead tired.
Welcome to modern suburban America, where you work 55 hours a week, commute 12 hours a week, and then try to keep up with your yard work, your bills, your relationship with your spouse/significant other and children, and everything else in what time you have left. Home cooked meals with fresh healthy foods go out the window, and you're whipping up processed crap left and right and eating 900 calorie fast food meals.
I say all this as a guy who moved to the suburbs seven years ago, got fat, and now can't sell his house.
More seriously, the working poor with much longer work hours and often two or even three jobs have it much harder.
If you actually look at why the unhealthy foods are so cheap, you'll often find a government subsidy or regulation at some point in the production chain. Farm subsidies come immediately to mind. That 99 cent McDonald's hamburger can be so cheap because the corn the cows eat sells for too little (as a result of subsidized production). The same subsidies, coupled with restrictions on the imporation of sugar are the reasons that we have so much high fructose corn syrup in our food. Healthy foods would have a much easier time competing in the (admittedly imperfect, but efficient and decentralized) market if the government interfered less than it did. I'd even support taxes on 'unhealthy' foods if it meant an end to farm subisides and other assorted regulations on our food. Ideally we wouldn't need either, but I prefer a tax with a readily discernable effect on price as opposed to the subtle, far reaching, and poorly understood market distortions that we suffer under currently.
"...one thing I noticed and found rather interesting was that overweight or otherwise unhealthy looking people usually bought the more expensive pre-made food while healthier people purchased instead a whole lot more of the items required to make their own food like flour and produce."
I've noticed the same thing. And it applies to meat as well. Butcher-cut meat that you actually have to cook yourself is bought by the lean and healthy; pre-packed pre-cooked meat-and-prepared-meal products are bought by the overweight.
I have friends who live almost entirely off "Lean Cuisine" and similar frozen diet meals. They don't eat a great deal (usually a small breakfast and one of these frozen diet meals per day) yet they are both overweight, and losing that battle. One of 'em also suffers from "chronic fatigue syndrome". Funny thing, whenever I stay at their house and eat what they do, I wake up the next day feeling tired and with no energy at all. Hmm...
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?