the massive masses

A report commissioned by the Food and Drug Administration found that most Americans are suffering from the long-term health consequences of not being as smart as the authors of the report.

These authors were gathered together by The Keystone Center, a policy group dedicated to helping “thought-leaders” make good decisions. Who are these thought-leaders? People who are not you.

The report’s conclusions are premised on the fact that you are overweight.  This was determined using the BMI, or “Body Mass Index.” The BMI is a tool designed by the government to help you better understand that you are a big fat load. You may not have realized that, but unless you are just coming out of a coma, a resident of Bangladesh, or Mary-Kate Olson, you are almost certainly overweight according to BMI statistics.

Why are you overweight? The reasons consist of a complex mosaic made up of the interplay among personal expectations, family influences and societal conventions but generally boil down to the fact that you are an idiot. This probably comes as a surprise to you but that is only because you do not have an advanced degree like Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy for the Center for Science in the Public Interest who points out that “If companies don’t tell them, people have no way of knowing how many calories they are being served at restaurants.”

This is an important point. Where would an American citizen even begin to look for such information absent some intervention by the authorities? Sure, you could punch “restaurant meal calories” into Google but what does that get you? Barely one million potential sources of information. It’s like there’s a conspiracy to hide this stuff or something. There are also the brochures offered by fast food restaurants but those are often as many as fifteen feet from the soda fountains and, being overweight, you aren’t capable of making that trip. It’s a kind of vicious cycle, you see.

And it’s not as if your average citizen could eye up a 24 oz. tenderloin, green beans smothered in cheese sauce and a potato as big as an Ottoman and determine that the meal might be “a lot.” No, you need to be not just smart, but Margo Wootan smart for that kind of sophisticated problem-solving challenge.

To address this dilemma, the Keystone report makes a number of recommendations but they essentially boil down to two main courses of action:

1. Reduce food consumption by requiring that restaurants offer customers things they don’t want, kind of the way NBC got viewers to watch less television by broadcasting shows no one likes. Such items could include smaller serving portions, steamed vegetables, and tree bark. Not only would this result in customers slimming down, but restaurant workers would shed pounds as well as declining business would make them less able to afford food.
2. Establish a far-reaching multi-faceted public education program the purpose of which would be to help the American populace to become more like the authors of the Keystone report.

Until these recommendations are put into place and people with PhDs are available to tell us what to do, we all remain vulnerable to our own poor decisions. That is why we here at Planet Moron are going to set an example and take immediate steps to cut down on our caloric intake by reducing from three to two, the number of olives we put in our martinis.

Hey, maybe that’s not a big reduction in your household...

J.