The food police have arrived: "... when it comes to policing the American diet this Administration takes the cake (quite literally).".

• Author: Emord, Jonathan W.
• Position: Nutrition

In many ways, Pres. Barack Obama and his allies in Congress believe they know better than you do what is in your own best interest but when it comes to policing the American diet this Administration takes the cake (quite literally). In an obscure provision of the 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act, Congress ordered Federal agencies to come up with a proposal for improving children's diets and stemming the tide of childhood obesity.

In pertinent part, Congress called for an Obama Administration working group "to conduct a study and develop recommendations for standards for the marketing of foods when such marketing targets children who are 17 years old or younger or when such food represents a significant component of the diets of children." In short, Congress, with the full support of the President ordered Federal agencies to propose to Congress a regulatory means for altering the American diet

Regulators at the Federal Trade Commission, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, and Department of Agriculture convened an Interagency Working Group on Food Marketed to Children, proposing measures that would deny consumers the freedom to access fattening foods and would deny producers of those foods the freedom to advertise their gustatory benefits. They invite the industry to adopt the measures voluntarily before the IWG makes its formal recommendations to Congress.

The recommendations are not that parents be given more information to make their own decisions concerning how best to regulate their children's diets; instead, the regulators favor measures that would restrict the kinds of foods and quantities of nutrients that could be sold to children--as well as the advertising of products to kids.

These recommendations depend on removing sovereignty from the individual and placing it in government. Not one word appears in the proposal stating a single concern that the measures, whether implemented through agency coercion or Congressional legislation, might deprive Americans of freedom of choice; or questioning the authority of the government to violate individual rights to liberty, speech, and property in pursuit of a public objective; or revealing whether some in the population of children would suffer caloric deprivation or be unduly restricted in accessing needed foods by the recommendations. Instead, the IWG proposal leaps from a presumption of a universal problem to a conclusion that government needs to coerce...