Restaurants that serve unhealthy food – not the consumers who choose to eat it – are to blame for an obesity epidemic in the United States, according to Joy Behar, a co-host of ABC’s popular daytime talk show “The View.”
“Those companies export their bad food all over the world,” Behar said February 4 during a discussion of a Mississippi proposal [1] to prevent restaurants from serving obese customers. “Why aren’t they being called to task instead of the victims of this type of eating?”
So now we are “victims” of our own “eating.”
Did the Hamburgler stop stealing burgers and start kidnapping unwitting victims and force-feeding them unhealthy fast food? When was the last time a restaurant manager held customers at gunpoint and demanded they order dessert?
Blaming restaurants and food producers for diners’ health problems is an easy excuse to avoid taking responsibility for your own actions.
The food industry advocates at the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) called the Mississippi bill “a particularly egregious example of food cops run amok” and said “the food-focused policy completely misses the biggest problem: sedentary lifestyles.”
The truth is, people choose to eat unhealthy foods for a variety of reasons and must be prepared to face the consequences of their actions. The restaurants are merely providing a service the market demands.
A CCF statement slammed Mississippians as “classic couch potatoes,” noting that the state is No. 1 in obesity rate [2] in the United States. The group suggested Mississippi lawmakers “should do something to help people burn more calories instead of pretending that eating out is a cardinal sin.”
Uncharacteristically for “The View,” however, co-host Whoopi Goldberg provided a brief voice of reason. “We’re doing this to the kids,” she admitted, calling out parents who don’t exercise with their children. “It’s not the restaurants ’cause you know once you start getting kids slimmed down they feel better. They say, ‘You know what, I don’t want to eat as many.’ But there’s nothing for them, there’s no way for them to do it.”
Goldberg also praised European government bans on “unhealthy” food ingredients like high fructose corn syrup, however. “They don’t allow it,” she said. “We allow it, something that was banned initially and now we put it back in there.”