A California state senator has cooked-up a bill that combines:
Talk about recipe for failure!
Steven Frank’s California has the details on this monstrosity:
Do you think your local doughnut shop, taco joint or pizza place could afford to spend $50,000 on a “risk assessment” for each of the foods it serves—because they “could cause obesity or cancer? Pass this and hundreds of thousands of Californians are out of work on Day One—and tens of thousands of Californians have lost there investments and businesses….“This bill, known as the Public Health Epidemic Protection Act of 2013, would require the department, for every product intended for consumer consumption for which it has credible evidence that the product significantly contributes to a significant public epidemic, to conduct a risk assessment evaluation to determine whether the product contributes significantly to a significant public health epidemic, as defined, and whether the adverse public health risk would have a fiscal impact on the state of $50,000,000 or more.The bill would authorize the department to charge the manufacturer of the product for the reasonable costs of producing the risk assessment and would create the Public Health Fund, to be used by the department, upon appropriation by the Legislature, to fund the program. If the department determines that the criteria are met, the bill would require the manufacturer to create, for approval of the department, a public health impact report (PHIR) containing specified information, including a list of adverse public health impacts and a mitigation plan for those impacts.”
Based on my biochemistry background, the information presented by Professor Glenn Reynolds, and information I have gleaned from reading from a variety of sources, I hold that the government is responsible for the obesity epidemic in this country:
The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) dietary guidelines are the gold standard for healthy eating, according to most experts. The problem is that these recommendations promote a low-fat, calorie-restricted diet based on grains like bread and rice. These kinds of foods consist almost entirely of carbohydrates. When you digest carbohydrates, they are converted into sugar in your bloodstream, the same sugar found in ice cream, soda, potato chips, and all the other junk foods most people would recognize as unhealthy. Since high blood sugar is toxic, your body produces a hormone called insulin to bring it down to a reasonable level. The trouble with this, however, is that insulin brings down your blood sugar by converting it to fat and sending it into your fat cells to be stored.
Welcome to the new federalism: State governments taxing and regulating us to solve problems created by our federal government.
California has been named the “worst state to do business” for 8 straight years. Legislation like this means we are apt to keep the title for a full decade at least!
Californians who want to join me in trying to jettison this bill before it becomes law can contact the sponsoring California Senator, Mark DeSaulnier, or one of the other state senators.
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