Size Politics

Americans say their representatives don’t listen to them. But do they look at them? If they notice, they keep their mouths shut ( a difficult activity) because mentioning obesity and its impact on affordable health care is not going to get them re-elected.

President Obama — the leanest since Lincoln — couldn’t downsize adult Americans — the numbers got worse on his watch. Now

President Trump has promised to make America great again, despite its greatly oversized citizenry. He’s not a PC kind of guy. He won’t be describing a 5’2” female carrying 210 pounds as a BIG girl. Size positivity is not a concept he recognizes. His wives and daughters are all slim and we know what he has to say on the subject of women whose behinds are not to his liking.

But, given the size of our problem, maybe President Trump has another plan. Remember he was elected because he said Mexico was going to pay for the wall to keep us safe. It’s logical to assume that we are going to pay for our own personal gluttony. It works in Japan where annual waistline measuring and penalties were instituted in 2008. The World Health Organization is in favor of this solution. They say ditch the BMI and substitute waistline measurements: max is 35 inches for women and 40 for men. So if you are not under these number pay up!!

And it won’t be hard to meet the standards. The FDA is coming to the rescue by approving several stomach-filling devices that can be inserted orally with only local or no anesthesia. And desperate health insurance companies think this will be cheaper than a lifetime of obesity-induced issues. Try the Double Balloon Device which fills up the big stomach. The Full Sense Device, not yet available, can be inserted using only local anesthesia in a ten minute procedure. This makes a root canal seem like major surgery. Expect a clinic to fix every stretched out stomach staffed by technicians not MDs coming to your neighborhood.