I wish I were as fat as I was the first time I thought I was fat, so something in Senior Editor Mark Friedman’s health column last week jumped out at me: Dr. Bruce Murphy, CEO of the Arkansas Heart Hospital, included artificial sweeteners in a list of factors contributing to the obesity epidemic that led his company to add weight-loss surgery to its menu of services.
Last year, The New York Times revealed that, in the 1960s when I was a tot, the sugar industry actually paid researchers “to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead.” As a result of this made-to-order science, the American diet shifted to “low-fat, high-sugar foods that some experts now blame for fueling the obesity crisis.”
So things we were doing to be slimmer and healthier — artificial sweeteners in our coffee and soft drinks, low-fat variations on pantry staples — were really stimulating our desire for sweets and thus having the opposite effect. Or so we are now led to believe. Who knows what we’ll believe in another 30 or 50 years?
I’ve started to think that “It seemed like such a good idea” may be the American epitaph, and manipulating our diets wasn’t even the start.
I recently watched PBS’ “American Experience” documentary on Rachel L. Carson and her bombshell nonfiction bestseller from 1962, “Silent Spring.” For my generation, the letters DDT are ominous; I had no idea that the pesticide was originally a wonder chemical credited as a key to the Allied victory in World War II by killing off malarial mosquitoes. The documentary showed film of a proponent demonstrating DDT’s safety by eating a spoonful of the fabulous powder.
Opioid painkillers are another category of miracle product that turned out to be deadly when used without proper respect. The Los Angeles Times published last summer a stunning investigative report on the marketing of OxyContin as a 12-hour pain reliever. When it turned out that the effectiveness wore off sooner for many patients, manufacturer Purdue Pharma didn’t back away from the claim. Instead, it encouraged physicians to prescribe bigger doses.
It seemed like such a good idea. What could go wrong? The headline on the Times report was a quote from one of the early guinea pigs: “You want a description of hell?”
Earlier this month, the federal Centers for Disease Control & Prevention released a report showing that the risk of dependency on opioid painkillers begins on the fifth day of use. The report looked at the number of pills in patients’ very first painkiller prescription. One in three patients whose first prescription contains a 30-day supply are still taking painkillers a year later.
You know what else seemed like a good idea? Letting employers take the lead in providing that new-fangled health insurance that was so cheap and straightforward about the same time DDT was considered safe enough to eat.
In the 1960s, employer-sponsored health insurance for working Americans was joined by Medicare for seniors and Medicaid for the poor and disabled, and the fragmented system was chock full of incentives for cost inflation and riddled with holes big enough for tens of millions of Americans to fall through.
In 1989, Stuart Butler, writing for the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, described a system “built upon unsound foundations.”
“Each time we have tried to deal with a particular health care need, we have added on a new component without addressing the underlying problems. But when a house is built on bad foundations, adding on extra rooms leads to continuous and expensive repairs — and the possibility of collapse.”
The Heritage Foundation disowned what Butler called “The Heritage Plan” about the time its central ideas — requiring every household to buy insurance if they could afford to do so and providing government subsidies for households that could not — were adopted into the Affordable Care Act. Obama-era Republicans, you see, believed that every part of the ACA had to be demonized as an un-American government takeover.
As of this writing, the U.S. House of Representatives had not voted on its one and only idea for replacing Obamacare, which even President Trump acknowledged would hurt many of the voters he had cavalierly promised to provide with better, cheaper coverage. Watching the wild machinations in Washington last week did make me wonder if some congressional Republicans might have started wishing the individual mandate, which sho-nuff conservatives of the Reagan-Bush era considered merely “personal responsibility,” was still available. Killing it dead had seemed like such a good idea.
Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com. |