Big brother is watching you for your own good

If you're fat, stand-by for federal text messages to change your eating habits

By Andrew Malcolm

Graphic Warning Message

Administration agencies are currently revising nutritional recommendations that will guide federal food and meal purchases for years after Barack Obama is playing golf behind his presidential library.

The federal Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee -- these are the folks who brought us the carb-heavy food pyramid now deemed erroneous -- is meeting these days to update nutritional guidelines to conform with new scientific evidence and with the determination of First Lady Michelle Obama to change America's eating habits.

Among new ideas under consideration are federal phone texts to obese citizens warning of their unhealthy eating behavior. Seriously.

Mrs. Obama has been a driving force behind the federal push to change restaurants' most popular items to healthier fare and to post calorie counts next to every menu item.

Also, to drastically alter school lunch menus to mixed reviews and to urge Americans, especially children, to pursue more active lifestyles at a young age when lifelong personal habits are forged. Recently, she also unveiled a new nutritional food labeling scheme.

An estimated 100 million Americans are considered obese, often a precursor to fatal conditions such as cancer, diabetes and heart attacks. In February came an optimistic sign as federal researchers reported a substantial decline in obesity among pre-schoolers.

The Obama White House immediately claimed some credit for the first lady's program, although the study began before that Texan's reelection in 2004.

The allegedly altruistic drive to extend federal controls and change Americans' eating behaviors has aroused resistance and criticism among some. They feel that although they are merely ordinary citizens, they are better-positioned than the Obama administration to decide what they and their children put in their mouths.

There's also been considerable grumbling about a first family that consumes six different kinds of Thanksgiving pies but feels qualified or authorized to offer pie-hole-filling advice to countrymen.

The dietary guidelines committee, a joint operation of the U.S. Agriculture Department and Health and Human Services that brought us ObamaCare, meets every five years to update nutrition recommendations.

But as Erik Telford recently warned in The Hill, "Some of its members seem much more focused on pursuing their own environmental agendas than educating American consumers on nutrition."

He cites one of the 15 committee members, Miriam Nelson, who feels the guidelines shouldn't be confined to nutrition, but should encompass the long-term sustainability and environmental impact of crops recommended for eating.

Another committee consultant is pushing "a plant-based diet" that appears to suggest human consumption of meats is not sustainable. Perhaps coincidentally, Obama's Environmental Protection Agency announced the other day that due to the deleterious effects of methane gas on global warming, it would somehow move against cow flatulence.

But the committee's final recommendations are no minor matter. For the next five years they will guide vast food purchases by the feds for government cafeterias, school meals across the country, all branches of the U.S. military and the entire federal prison system.