Fat tax: a taxing diet

Quote from Health Official Willing to go the Mat Over Obesity and Sugared Sodas.

A response to the "crusading" Dr. Richard Daines, who is trying to get a penny-an-ounce tax on sugared sodas passed in New York State, from supermarket owner Mr. Nelson Eusebio:

“Educating people helps them more than taxing them,” Mr. Eusebio said. “If taxation was a form of diet, New Yorkers would be the healthiest people on the planet because we are the most overtaxed people on the planet.”

I like this image of taxation as a form of diet. In my mind it links to the larger dyad of restraint/lack of restraint that seems to be threading through my understanding of not only my target but most of CATTt.

Baby Fat Facts

Baby Fat Not Be So Cute After All suggests that all the policy changes aimed at school aged children (reducing access to sugared sodas, revamping school lunches by adding salad bars) may be too little, too late. Research points to evidence that signs of childhood obesity, and the related health problem of diabetes, begin in infancy, even in the womb.

One of the most convincing studies on the link between gestational diabetes in the mother and diabetes in her children was done almost 10 years ago among Pima Indians. Siblings born after the mother developed Type 2 diabetes had a higher body mass index throughout childhood and were almost four times as likely to develop diabetes as siblings born before the diagnosis.

“The intrauterine environment of a woman with diabetes overnourishes the fetus,” said the study’s author, Dana Dabelea, an epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health. And that, she added, may “reset the offspring’s satiety set point, and make them predisposed to eat more.”

There a many reasons that I find this research troubling, especially the ways in which it would be easy to blame fat women for harming their fetuses. In a Left Hand of Darkness sort of way, I could see a time in which fat women of breeding age were locked up into prison and made lose weight to insure a healthy, non-fat next generation.

But for some reason, in a non-logical tangential step sort of way, the idea that the battle to not be fat starts in the womb, that restraint and lack of restraint are issues from before birth, makes me think of Virno's equation of the dangerousness of humans with our capacity to innovate (Virno, 20).

It's Not Easy Being

It's Not Easy Being Fat Again by Alessandra Stanley is a review of a new reality show "Kirstie Alley’s Big Life." I posted this link without any commentary weeks ago in a bookmark for later sort of way. At the time, we did not yet have a clear picture of the tale/tail of Part II of the blog.  What interested me at the time was the sheer number of TV shows about obesity.

Gaining back lost pounds is every dieter’s nightmare, of course, and “Big Life” takes its place in a widening spectrum of obesity television. Ever more extreme seasons of “The Biggest Loser” are matched by myriad variations, which over the years have included “More to Love,” “Dance Your Ass Off,” “X-Weighted,” “Big Medicine,” “Honey We’re Killing the Kids,” “Bulging Brides” and “I Can Make You Thin.”

Stanley complains that Alley's second look at being fat is tragedy.  "The self-indulgence and denial that were hyped for laughs on “Fat Actress” are still in play, but without the same wit or satiric bite." She wants it to be comedy.


While there are plenty of problems with Stanley's positioning of the show (the stereotype of the jolly fat person that pokes fun at her own obesity to entertain us being just one), I think her desire for a more comedic flavor has much to do with wanting a show that is more hopeful than despairing. Laughing at and through your troubles, can be denial or well-disguised bitter self mockery, but often it shows resiliency, flexibility and an ability to tell a narrative about yourself that helps you keep on keeping on even with weighted down by things that are difficult to change or sustain.


Our creation of like-but-not-quite-joke-machines is a way to uncover the unthought rooted in the hopeful belief that it is possible to innovate. It is not that the comedic is truer than the tragic or that the comedic is inherently hopeful; much comedy is rather bleak about the human condition when we cut through its protective laugh layers. Yet the comedic attitude does offer a wider range of possibilities than the tragic. As we try to twist our thoughts out of shape to find new thoughts, we want the option that gives us the most flexibility.