Word: tobacco
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...most controversial ideas from the obesity warriors call for a greater role for the Federal Government. Ideally, they are looking for action on the order of the 1964 Surgeon General's report on tobacco, which kicked off a national effort to reduce smoking. Obesity, they point out, is on the verge of supplanting smoking as the nation's No. 1 preventable cause of disease and death. Many of their suggestions for federal action come directly from the antismoking playbook...
...would the Federal Government fund a national campaign for healthier eating? Once again, the obesity warriors want to steal a leaf from the tobacco wars: if you want people to use less of something, put a tax on it. "Health economists have shown that the tax on cigarettes is the single most effective thing they've done to prevent smoking," says Brownell, so why not tax junk foods or soda? A big tax, like that on cigarettes, would not be palatable, but Brownell believes a small tax could go a long way toward funding anti-obesity campaigns...
Health economist Kenneth Warner, director of the University of Michigan Tobacco Research Network, remembers when the world thought it was everyone's personal responsibility to cut down on smoking and when the government had little to say on the matter. In many ways, he says, where we are in fighting obesity today is similar to where we were with cigarettes in the early '60s: "We've identified a health-risk factor, but we're only now starting to get serious about conveying its importance and magnitude to the public...
Fourth, personal responsibility is a trap. The argument is startlingly similar to the tobacco industry's efforts to stave off legislative and regulatory interventions. The nation tolerated personal-responsibility arguments from Big Tobacco for decades, with disastrous results...
...rolling penny cigars on a sidewalk in early-1900s Cuba, Teorifio Perez-Carillo could not have dreamed that someday his handiwork would be legendary among Hollywood stars and other aficionados. Or that his son Ernesto would buy the building behind his sidewalk stake and turn it into a tobacco warehouse. Or that his grandson, also named Ernesto, would take over the operation in Miami and become a multimillionaire...