Food Fight?

It appears Whole Foods has decided to take a unique approach to promoting a healthy lifestyle among it's employees: Weigh less? Pay less!

To save you from the advert, I'll sum up the video: Whole Foods employees will receive a discount of 22 to 30 percent based upon their Body Mass Index. The goal: improve employee health and cut down company medical care costs. The problem: Some people think its discriminatory against the obese.

To be honest, I don't recall having ever seen an obese person in Whole Foods. I guess that's besides the point.

As a bleeding heart liberal-tarian, I feel compelled to say that I am against discrimination of any sort, but I have to admit, I have some caveats to that. My caveats are this: what ever it is you are or are doing shouldn't impact others or society in any way. Once your way of life starts to impose on somebody else, a little discrimination may be in order for you.

I can hear the birds chirping, "But, obesity doesn't harm anybody but the person who is obese."

I beg to differ.

First off, I will grant that for some people, obesity is beyond their control. I know that. I am aware. However, for the vast majority of people who are obese, it is not the result of any medical condition, but the culmination of countless lifestyle choices. Most of these choices concern a lifestyle of limited activity combined with unhealthy eating habits. I'm sure most of you are adults, and you live in a free country, and I not only support your right to eat portion sizes bigger than your head, but also your right to put syrup on french fries, mayonaisse on twinkies, and to deep-fry Coca-cola. Heck, I even devoted several years of military service to protect your right to do those things.

Now, do you have health insurance? If your employed full-time, chances are you do. If not, chances are good you that you wish you were. I recently filled out some employer sponsored health care forms and I was asked about a handful of things: Do you smoke? What is your medical history? Your family's medical history? Etc. Etc. Alot of questions are asked, but the absence of a few questions is what interests me the most. Like these: What did you have for dinner last night? What is your Body Mass Index? How many calories do you consume, on average, a day? How much exercise do you get during the day?

This second list of questions are every bit as important to your overall health as the first, if not more. Your body is built on what you put into it, and runs off of the fuel you give it. If your diet is high in sugar, refined carbohydrates, salt, preservatives, and whatever the hell it is those fast food restaurants put in their meat, you are setting yourself up for health problems.

How does that infringe upon me? Well, because insurance companies don't ask you those questions that I pointed out, I can't get a 15% percent "I'll just have a salad" discount, even though I made a responsible choice for my body. My healthcare costs are higher because of the poor choices made by obese people.

Think of it this way: If you are obese, lifting a cheesburger up to your lips is no different than smoking.

With the national health care debate raging, it shocks me how much actual health is not discussed. Maybe health care costs wouldn't be rising so quickly if the food most Americans ate wasn't processed, salted and sugared for taste, preserved, wrapped in a box, and given a shelf life of several weeks to several months. Maybe health care costs would be lower if exercise bikes were as plentiful at my work place as candy and soda machines were.

I am in favor of national medical coverage...in theory. It's the implementation and cost that bothers me. Maybe if we focused on the 'health' and less on the 'care', we could eliminate alot of the costs assocaited with poor lifestyle choices, and concentrate our efforts on legitmate health problems. That is a plan for national medical coverage that I can support.