Faced with the high cost of caring for smokers and overeaters, experts say society must grapple with a blunt question: Instead of trying to penalize them and change their ways, why not just let these health sinners die prematurely from their unhealthy habits?

Annual health care costs are roughly $96 billion for smokers and $147 billion for the obese, the government says. These costs accompany sometimes heroic attempts to prolong lives, including surgery, chemotherapy and other measures.

But despite these rescue attempts, smokers tend to die 10 years earlier on average, and the obese die five to 12 years prematurely, according to various researchers estimates.

And attempts to curb smoking and unhealthy eating frequently lead to backlash: Witness the current legal tussle over New York Citys first-of-its-kind limits on the size of sugary beverages and the vicious fight last year in California over a ballot proposal to add a $1-per-pack cigarette tax, which was ultimately defeated.

“This is my life. I should be able to do what I want,” said Sebastian Lopez, a college student from Queens, speaking last September when the New York City Board of Health approved the soda size rules.

Critics also contend that tobacco- and calorie-control measures place a disproportionately heavy burden on poor people. Thats because they:

-Smoke more than the rich, and have higher obesity rates.

-Have less money so sales taxes hit them harder. One study last year found poor, nicotine-dependent smokers in New York – a state with very high cigarette taxes – spent as much as a quarter of their entire income on smokes.

-Are less likely to have a car to shop elsewhere if the corner bodega or convenience store stops stocking their vices.

Critics call these approaches unfair, and believe they have only a marginal effect. “Ultimately these things are weak tea,” said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a physician and fellow at the right-of-center think tank, the American Enterprise Institute.

Gottlieb’s view is debatable. There are plenty of public health researchers that can show smoking control measures have brought down smoking rates and who will argue that smoking taxes are not regressive so long as money is earmarked for programs that help poor people quit smoking.

Do Penalties for Smokers and the Obese Make Sense?

Obesity, a major factor in diabetes and heart disease, imposes costs on both public and private sectors and is a drag on economic growth, but business leaders meeting in Davos cant agree on what they can or should do to address it.

The World Economic Forum has some notable past achievements in healthcare, such as galvanizing support for the fight against AIDS and the vaccination of children in poor countries, but tackling the rise in obesity promises to be a much more complicated task.

“There are huge interests involved. The question is how can we align interests? Industry sees the impact on their bottom line. They need a healthy workforce and healthy consumers,” said WEF health and healthcare expert Olivier Raynaud.

The WEF estimates a cumulative $47 trillion of output might be lost in the next 20 years due to non-communicable diseases and mental health problems, with obesity to blame for 44 percent of the diabetes burden and 23 percent of heart disease costs.

One look at the list of the strategic partners of the WEF shows how many vested interests are at play – food and drink companies are blamed for feeding the crisis, while drug manufacturers profit from soaring rates of diabetes.

There are also issues of consumer choice to take into account, and the fact that companies selling calorie-dense foods often also make a range of healthier alternatives.

“We could stop selling ice cream, but people are still going to want to eat ice cream,” said Paul Bulcke, chief executive of food giant Nestle, which has been investing heavily in developing healthier products, including low-fat ice cream.

Just this week, Coca-Cola, whose chief executive Muhtar Kent is one of the co-chairs of this years Davos gathering, launched a commercial on U.S. cable television that seeks to highlight the companys efforts in fighting obesity.

As the soft drink industry faces the threat of tighter regulation, the commercial notes that Coca-Cola sells about 180 low and no-calorie drinks and reminds viewers “if you eat and drink more calories than you burn off, youll gain weight”.

Davos divided on tackling the scourge of obesity | Reuters

The first courtroom arguments in the closely watched case ended without an immediate ruling. Opponents said they planned to ask a judge to delay enforcement during the suit, which has broached questions of racial fairness alongside arguments about government authority and burdens to business.

The NAACP’s New York state branch and a network of Hispanic groups have joined a legal effort to block the first-of-its-kind restriction, igniting questions Wednesday about the groups’ ties to the beverage industry.

Beverage makers, restaurateurs, minority advocates and other critics told a judge the upcoming 16-ounce limit was a finger-wagging incursion on consumer choice, rife with inconsistencies that would cost a hot dog vendor business while still allowing New Yorkers to buy belly-buster sodas at the chain convenience store next to him. Opponents’ lawyers called it “ham-handed,” “grossly unfair” and just “plain silly.”

“New Yorkers do not want to be told what to drink,” attorney James Brandt said.

City lawyers acknowledged the rule’s limitations. It doesn’t apply to all high-calorie drinks or all places that sell them, largely because of the city can regulate only some establishments. But it’s still a reasonable and needed move to take on the city’s growing weight problem and the diseases linked to it, they said.

“While this may not be a silver bullet that will cure the obesity epidemic, it’s rational … (and) one step that can be taken,” said the city Health Department’s chief lawyer, Thomas Merrill.

The suit, filed by the American Beverage Association and others, seeks to block the restriction, set to take effect March 12. With no immediate ruling Wednesday, opponents said they planned to ask state Supreme Court Justice Milton Tingling to put it on hold until the case is decided. The city will oppose such a move, Merrill said after the hearing.

The latest in a line of healthy-eating initiatives during Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, the beverage rule bars restaurants and many other eateries from selling high-sugar drinks in cups or containers bigger than 16 ounces. Violations could bring $200 fines; the city doesn’t plan to start seeking those until June.

In explaining the cola crackdown, officials cite the city’s rising obesity rate – about 24 percent of adults, up from 18 percent in 2002 – and point to studies linking sugary drinks to weight gain. Care for obesity-related illnesses costs more than $4.7 billion a year citywide, and government programs pay about 60 percent of that, according to city Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley.

Opponents portray the regulation as government nagging that scapegoats sugary drinks for a multifaceted fat problem, and they say the restriction is unfairly narrow.

Unsweetened juice and milk-based drinks are excluded; health officials say they have nutritional value. The regulation also doesn’t cover alcoholic drinks or sales at supermarkets and many convenience stores – among them 7-Eleven, home of the Big Gulp – because they aren’t subject to city health rules.

The NAACP and the Hispanic Federation, an organization of 100 Northeastern groups, say their concern is that minority-owned delis and corner stores will end up at a disadvantage compared with grocery chains.

It’s a complaint voiced behind deli counters in heavily Hispanic East Harlem, where managers such as Yolanda Peralta see the restriction as inequitable.

“We’re paying taxes like every other store. … We should have the same rights that everybody else,” Peralta said Wednesday.

But others questioned the advocacy groups’ links to the soda companies whose fight they’ve joined. Among the ties:

– Coca-Cola announced last month it was giving a $100,000 grant to the national NAACP to support a healthy-lifestyles program

– PepsiCo gave the group more than $10,000 in 2010, according to the soda maker’s website.

– Former Hispanic Federation President Lillian Rodriguez Lopez left for a job at Coca-Cola in in February.

– The groups were represented Wednesday by a firm that also has represented Coca-Cola. The firm, King & Spalding, is representing the advocacy groups for free, lawyer Ann M. Cook said.

Given that obesity rates are higher than average among blacks and Hispanics, the NAACP should refuse soda makers’ money and “reevaluate the position the group is taking in New York City,” Michael F. Jacobson, the executive director of the nutrition advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest, said in a statement Wednesday.

He and Stan Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, noted that tobacco companies’ established relationship with African-American leadership organizations in decades past.

The strategy in the soda fight is “straight out of tobacco,” Glantz said.

Hazel Dukes, the NAACP’s New York president, bristled at the idea that the nearly 104-year-old group was swayed by the soda industry’s support.

“No one buys the NAACP,” she said in a telephone interview, noting that foundations also have contributed to the organization’s obesity-fighting initiatives.

Soda makers’ money “is not the issue here,” she said. “The issue is fairness.”

Beverage Industry, NYC Lawyers Duel Over Drinks.

A Cheesecake Factory pasta dish with more than 3,000 calories – or more than a day and a half of the recommended caloric intake for an average adult – is among the headliners on this year’s Xtreme Eating list of the most unhealthy dishes at U.S. chain restaurants.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer-focused nonprofit group that promotes healthier eating, compiles an annual list of “food porn” to alert consumers to menu items with eye-popping levels of calories, saturated fat, sugar and/or sodium.

“You’d think that the size of their profits depended on their increasing the size of your pants,” CSPI Executive Director Michael Jacobson said of the industry’s Xtreme Eating winners. The list was released on Wednesday.

CSPI for years has used the “awards” to raise awareness and drum up support for calorie disclosure on restaurant menus – something that larger chains soon will be required to do under the U.S. health reform law.

The Cheesecake Factory’s Bistro Shrimp Pasta, made with a butter and cream sauce and topped with battered, fried shrimp, has 3,120 calories and 89 grams of saturated fat and 1,090 milligrams of sodium, said CSPI, which said it confirmed nutritional data with companies on the list.

Cheesecake Factory said that dish has 3,020 calories, 79 grams of saturated fat and 1,076 milligrams of sodium.

Typical adults are advised to consume no more than 20 grams of saturated fat and 1,500 milligrams of sodium per day.

“It’s like eating three orders of Olive Garden’s Lasagna Classico plus an order of tiramisu for dinner,” CSPI said. Some in the food and beverage industries have dubbed the Washington-based group the “food police.”

Cheesecake Factory pasta on list of caloric food porn | Reuters

One of the puzzles of the modern world is why we humans are growing so tubby. Maybe these two mice offer a clue.

They’re genetically the same, raised in the same lab and given the same food and chance to exercise. Yet the bottom one is svelte, while the other looks like, well, an American.

The only difference is that the top one was exposed at birth to just one part per billion of an endocrine-disrupting chemical. The brief exposure programmed the mouse to put on fat, and although there were no significant differences in caloric intake or expenditure, it continued to put on flab long after the chemical was gone.

That experiment is one of a growing number of peer-reviewed scientific studies suggesting that one factor in the industrialized world’s obesity epidemic along with Twinkies, soda and television may be endocrine-disrupting chemicals. These chemicals are largely unregulated — they are in food, couches, machine receipts and shampoos — and a raft of new studies suggest that they can lead to the formation of more and larger fat cells.

Before I describe some of this research, a more basic issue: Why should an op-ed columnist write about scholarship published in scientific journals? Don’t pundits have better things to fret about, like the feuding between Democrats and Republicans?

One answer is that obesity is an important national problem, partly responsible for soaring health care costs. Yet the chemical lobby, just like the tobacco industry before it, has impeded serious regulation and is even trying to block research.

A second is that journalists historically have done a poor job covering public health issues — we were slow on the dangers of tobacco and painfully delinquent in calling attention to the perils of lead — but these are central to our national well-being. Our lives are threatened less by the Taliban in Afghanistan than by unregulated contaminants at home.

Endocrine disruptors are a class of chemicals that mimic hormones and therefore confuse the body. Initially, they provoked concern because of their links to cancers and the malformation of sex organs. Those concerns continue, but the newest area of research is the impact that they have on fat storage.

Fat Thanks to Sunita K. for the tip!

Warnings From a Flabby Mouse – NYTimes.com

The high saturated fat levels in food such as burgers lower children’s immune systems, it is believed.

A research project involving more than 50 countries found that teenagers who ate junk food three times a week or more were 39 per cent more likely to get severe asthma. Younger children were 27 per cent more at risk.

Both were also more prone to the eye condition rhinoconjunctivitis, according to The Sun newspaper

But just three weekly portions of fruit and vegetables could cut that risk by 14 per cent in the younger group and 11 per cent among the teens, it is believed.

Researchers from New Zealand’s Auckland University looked at the diets of 181,000 youngsters aged six to seven and 319,000 aged 13-14.

Junk food linked to asthma and eczema in children – Telegraph

Coca-Cola became one of the world’s most powerful brands by equating its soft drinks with happiness. Now it’s taking to the airwaves for the first time to address a growing cloud over the industry: obesity.

The Atlanta-based company on Monday will begin airing a two-minute spot during the highest-rated shows on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC in hopes of flexing its marketing muscle in the debate over sodas and their impact on public health. The ad lays out Coca-Cola’s record of providing drinks with fewer calories and notes that weight gain is the result of consuming too many calories of any kind – not just soda.

For Coca-Cola, the world’s No. 1 beverage company, the ads reflect the mounting pressures on the broader industry. Later this year, New York City is set to enact a first-in-the-nation cap on the size of soft drinks sold at restaurants, movie theaters and sports arenas. The mayor of Cambridge, Mass., has already introduced a similar measure, saying she was inspired by New York’s move.

Even when PepsiCo Inc., the No. 2 soda maker, recently signed a wide-ranging endorsement deal with pop singer Beyonce, critics called for her to drop the contract or donate the funds to health initiatives.

New research in the past year also suggests that sugary drinks cause people to pack on the pounds independent of other behavior. A decades-long study involving more than 33,000 Americans, for example, suggested that drinking sugary beverages interacts with genes that affect weight and enhances a person’s risk of obesity beyond what it would be from heredity alone.

Michael Jacobson, executive director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, was skeptical about Coca-Cola’s ads and said the company would stop fighting soda taxes if it was serious about helping reduce obesity.

“It looks like a page out of damage control 101,” he said. “They’re trying to disarm the public.”

Coca-Cola to address obesity for first time in ads – DC Breaking Local News Weather Sports FOX 5 WTTG

Male members of a jury are more likely to find a defendant guilty if the accused person is an overweight female.

According to a recent study by Yale University psychologists, male – and not female – jurors are also more inclined to believe that a fat woman is a repeat offender who had malicious intent.

Study: Male Jurors More Likely To Find Overweight Women Guilty « CBS Connecticut

A heavyset woman caved through an Upper East Side sidewalk last night — dropping six feet into a huge hole where she was eventually pulled out by emergency crews using a crane-like rescue unit, authorities said.

The 31-year-old Queens woman was huddled up against the wall of Atomic Wings at the Blue Room Grill on the corner of East 60th Street and Second Avenue, seeking shelter from the rain while waiting for a bus, when the sidewalk below her gave way around 9:15 p.m., witnesses said.

“The woman was enormous. She had to be more than 300 pounds,” said Daniel Crumity, 44, of Queens, who watched in disbelief from a window inside the Blue Room. “The ground literally fell out from underneath her.

Heavyset woman falls through Upper East Side sidewalk – NYPOST.com

Millions of people reach for an afternoon diet soda as a pick-me-up to make it through the rest of the day. But new research suggests sodas and other sugary drinks — especially artificially sweetened ones — could be related to depression.

According to the research, which will be officially released at the American Academy of Neurology’s annual meeting in mid-March, people who drink four cans or more of soda daily are about 30 percent more likely to be diagnosed with depression than people who don’t drink soda. Coffee drinkers are about 10 percent less likely to develop depression than people who don’t drink coffee.

Diet Soda Linked to Depression in NIH Study – US News and World Report