What You Eat Is Your Business By Radley Balko Analysis

In “What You Eat is Your Business” by Radley Balko, emphasizing that our fight for obesity is going about the wrong way. He insists “Our government ought to be working to foster a sense of responsibility in and ownership of our own health and wellbeing.” In making this comment Balko urges us to begin to take responsibility for our own actions for being obese, the government is not to blame but ourselves. To further support this claim Balko begins to use our healthcare system and laws passed as examples of how individuals are not taking responsibility. “ States are preventing private health insures from charging overweight and obese clients higher premiums, which effectively removes any financial incentive for maintaining a healthy lifestyle.”
It reminds me of an old proverb “ You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink it.” This means that we can have all the most healthy food in the world but if people do not want to drink it then there is no point. It is hard to get people out of their customary ways of constantly eating junk food and not exercising. We can no longer blame big companies for the choices we make. “Holding food companies responsible for the bad habits of unhealthy customers.” The people need to take responsibility for the food they eat, we can not continue to put sanctions on companies for the bad choices we make. Ultimately if the companies have bad unhealthy food people will not buy it and the company will either go out of business or change its menu. Balko argues that, “if policymakers want to fight obesity, they’ll halt the creeping socialization of medicine, and move to return individual Americans’ ownership of their own health and wellbeing back to individuals Americans.” This entails that we need to stop making others pay for other individuals mistakes by stopping the socialization of health