It probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise that Chevy Chase has a lot of free time on his hands. Apparently unable to occupy himself with a film career that’s sputtering on the fumes of past groaners, Chase has turned to full-time food policing.
On behalf of the Center for Environmental Education Online — which he and his wife co-founded in 2004 — Chase recently testified before Congress about rising rates of childhood obesity. His testimony (which you can view here) was straight out of obesity scaremongers’ mythmaking manual, and resembles many of his films in that it’s laughably bad comedy.
After repeating the thoroughly discredited claim that today’s American school children will have a shorter life expectancy than their parents, the former Saturday Night Live star goes on to bemoan the evils of “processed foods” and vending machines. Given his extensive experience in child nutrition (all movie stars have Ph.D.’s right?), we expected Chase to provide some evidence linking the targets of his ire to childhood obesity rates. But, alas, the proof isn’t forthcoming. And in his final minutes, Chase curiously extols the virtues of parental responsibility — while advocating for intrusive federal regulations.
Even if there weren’t gobs of evidence that food isn’t to blame for kids’ growing waistlines, it would still be hard to take Chase seriously. After all, he has hawked Doritos (definitely a food police no-no) and recently starred in several (exceedingly nonsensical) ads for a Turkish soda pop. (View here and here.)
Here’s hoping this phase of Chevy Chase’s career lasts about as long his talk show.
