Prompted by a study showing that Hawaii’s teens are twice as obese as the national average, a conference on “Childhood Obesity in Hawaii” was held last week in Honolulu. The most bombastic speaker, not surprisingly, was Yale University’s Kelly Brownell, a long-time proponent of taxing high-calorie foods. Brownell argued for unilateral action against food producers and restaurants, similar to that taken against the tobacco industry. He told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin: “We’ve let one industry [food] escape scrutiny and the other [tobacco] not.” Brownell says we should accept government control over TV fast-food ads, ban fast foods and soft drinks in all schools, completely restructure all school lunch programs, subsidize the production and sale of “healthy foods,” and (according to the Star Bulletin), “if money is needed to do these things, ‘tax bad foods.'”
