Daniel Akst: It's not tainted food that's killing us

Daniel Akst is a member of the Newsday editorial board.

Congress can't agree on much these days, but both parties have managed to come together on food safety. The House and Senate have approved sweeping measures, and if they can overcome a procedural glitch they'll send a single bill to the president by year-end.

Why shouldn't they? Food-borne illnesses are believed to kill 5,000 Americans annually.

Yet this is only the toll from tainted food. And unfortunately, tainted food isn't our main problem. Our main problem is that we eat too much of the untainted stuff. The result is our much-discussed national epidemic of obesity. When you count up the toll from weight-related type 2 diabetes, heart disease and other such ailments - all of them in some sense food-borne - the food-safety issue pales in comparison. The fork unfortunately is quite a bit mightier than the amoeba.

How many Americans die from eating too much "safe" food? Scientists don't altogether agree, but the generally accepted answer is, a lot.

For example: A major study that came out last year from public-health researchers at Harvard and elsewhere found that if we could all get down to an appropriate body weight, we could save 216,000 lives - annually.

By way of perspective, that single-year toll is greater than the number of Americans who perished in our conflicts in Vietnam, Korea and World War I, combined.

By way of further perspective: A study by some other Harvard researchers last year estimated that a lack of health insurance can be linked to about 45,000 deaths annually in this country.

To some extent, focusing on tainted food under these circumstances puts Uncle Sam in the position of the drunk searching for his keys under a streetlight. Asked where he'd seen them last, he jerks a thumb over his shoulder into the darkness. "I lost them back there," he says. "But the light's better over here."

Yet tainted food is a problem, whether you're overweight or not. And it's much easier for the government to police the food supply than to police the eaters of food.

Consider that, roughly speaking, a third of American adults are obese and another third weigh more than they should, at least according to U.S. government standards. (The government relies on a measure called body mass index, which relates weight to height; if you'd like to know where you stand, Google "BMI calculator" and plug in the numbers.)

America isn't the only country with a weight problem. But America's weight problem is especially bad, and it illustrates a gigantic challenge for any democratic government: How do you get people to quit the harmful things they do to themselves?

The sad fact is that something like half of all the deaths in this country are related to bad habits like smoking, overeating and alcohol abuse. Our obsessive focus on safety (Will my cell phone give me cancer? Will my flight to Cleveland blow up in midair?) makes very little sense when a million Americans die each year as victims of their own food choices, sedentary lifestyle, cigarette consumption and the like.

It's great to crack down on tainted food. But what we need now are some noncoercive ways to get people to change their behavior. Effective ones won't be easy to find, but at the very least we can broaden our view of food safety. Schools and businesses could minimize junk food in the cafeteria and make the healthy stuff cheaper. People could be offered the chance to sign up for a tax penalty if they gain too much weight in a year.

The truth is, there's no such thing as safe food, for it's the dose that makes the poison.