Everyone expected that New York City’s Board of Health, all 11
members of which were appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, would
rubber-stamp his proposed 16-ounce cap on servings of
sugar-sweetened soft drinks. But at a meeting in June, several
board members zeroed in on the most obvious problem with
Bloomberg’s plan to treat adults like children: It does not go far
enough.

Given Bloomberg’s avowed goal of reducing New Yorkers’
waistlines by reducing their calorie intake, his soda scheme is
indeed absurdly inadequate, as he inadvertently emphasizes every
time he minimizes the extent to which it will restrict consumer
freedom. Once we accept the premise that our weight is the
government’s business, we open the door to meddling far more
intrusive and oppressive than Bloomberg’s pint-sized pop
prescription, which is bound to fail as an anti-obesity measure but
could still succeed as a paternalistic precedent.

Comments by Board of Health members highlighted the timidity of
the mayor’s supposedly courageous plan. Joel Forman questioned the
exception for milk-based beverages such as coffee drinks and
chocolate shakes, which “have monstrous amounts of calories”—more
per ounce than soda, in fact, which is also true of the fruit
juices that are exempt from Bloomberg’s serving ceiling.

Another board member, Michael Phillips, noted that the carve-out
for drinks sold by convenience stores, supermarkets, and vending
machines (which are not regulated by the city’s health department),
means 7-Eleven’s Big Gulp—the very epitome of the effervescent
excess decried by Bloomberg—will remain available. There also was
murmuring about the continued legality of free refills, which will
allow people to drink as much soda as they want, provided they do
it 16 ounces at a time.

And why focus exclusively on beverages, when man does not get
fat by soda alone? If the city is going to ban extra-large drinks
in movie theaters, what about extra-large popcorn? “The popcorn
isn’t a whole lot better from a nutritional point of view than the
soda is,” board member Bruce Vladeck observed, “and may have even
more calories.” Phillips likewise questioned the mayor’s liquidity
preference. “We’re really looking at restricting portion size,” he
said, “so the argument could be…what about the size of a hamburger
or the jumbo fries, and all that kind of stuff?”

Bloomberg himself undermines the case for his rule by insisting
that it will not constrain people’s choices in any meaningful way.
“It’s a little less convenient to have to carry two 16-ounce drinks
to your seat in the movie theater rather than one 32-ounce
[drink],” he conceded when he unveiled the plan in May, but “I
don’t think you can make the case that we’re taking things
away.”

If so, what’s the point? The plan cannot possibly work unless
the burdens it imposes lead people to consume less soda than they
otherwise would. Even then, there is no assurance that they won’t
make up the difference in unregulated areas of their diets.

So why would anyone, even a fervent fat fighter, support
Bloomberg’s big beverage ban? The endorsements touted by the city
range from the highly improbable (“curtailing the sale of supersize
sugary drinks can have a huge impact on the health of our
children”) to the barely coherent (“Sugar is the tobacco of this
decade!…Energy Up! Wooooo!”). But the most common theme is that
interfering with people’s drink orders, even if it has no
measurable impact on its own, represents “a step in the right
direction.”

Which direction is that, exactly? “They are establishing the
role of government in fighting obesity,” explained Yale obesity
expert Kelly Brownell, adding that “we’ll have to do many such
things in order to reverse the epidemic.” If that prospect fills
you with dread rather than hope, now is the time to speak up,
before healthier-than-thou busybodies like Bloomberg get
serious.