Here's this week's pop quiz. Question 1: How do most Americans react when Janet Jackson's nipple is exposed on television or Howard Stern fills the morning airwaves with raunchy sex talk? Answer: "The government has to do something about this filth!"

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Question 2: How do most Americans react when they hear that our nation's obesity epidemic has gotten worse? Answer: "The government had better stay away from my cheeseburger!"

That's the kind of week it was in America, as our federal lawmakers voted down a bill that would allow consumers to sue restaurants (specifically fast-food restaurants) for making them fat. A day later, the same lawmakers voted for higher penalties for vulgarity on the airwaves. The mixed message: "The government can't help your bulging waistline, but we'll protect your offended eyes and ears."

Nothing better typified our nation's do-nothing approach to obesity than  Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson's announcement last week of "renewed efforts" (his words) against the increasing trend  in increasing  waistlines. Sixty-four percent of Americans are now considered overweight. Obesity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is about to pass tobacco as the leading cause of preventable death. Our society spends hundreds of billions dealing with the cost of obesity and related diseases.

"Overweight and obesity are literally killing us," Thompson said. "We need to tackle America's weight issues as aggressively as we are addressing smoking and tobacco."

Truer words were never spoken by a Bush Administration official (except, perhaps, that time when the president admitted that he started the war with Saddam because "he tried to kill my daddy").  So what is the government doing to fight the nation's deadly obesity problem?Thompson announced it is launching a TV ad campaign and a Web site (imagine, they want you to get healthier by parking your rear on the couch or at your desk) and a new study to be conducted by the National Institutes of Health. (Don't hold your breath for anything major here; whatever the scientists uncover will be cleansed of any anti-Big-Business recommendations before it reaches any policymaker's desk at the White House. Just ask the guys who did the EPA pollution studies that somehow absolved the power plant operators).

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Thompson is talking the talk by linking obesity prevention to our nation's historic battle against smoking, but it would be nice if he had actually walked the walk: If we're really serious about treating high-fat, unhealthy foods the way we treated cigarettes, we need to bring back two major weapons in the public health arsenal: lawsuits and taxes. The "small-government"/"frivolous lawsuit" crowd wants you to forget this, but high taxes on cigarettes and lawsuits against Big Tobacco did much more than silly public service ads to curtail smoking, preventing millions of deaths and saving billions of health care dollars.

Yet every time some legislator proposes a simple tax on high-fat or high-calorie foods, he or she is run out of town on federally subsidized rails. Capable lawmakers like Sen. Deborah Ortiz in California (and many others I've profiled here) found that out when their modest "fat tax" proposals earned them everything from ridicule to death threats.

Ortiz's proposed soda pop tax never made it out of the California legislature. She said she was just happy to get a bill through that would phase out soda pop sales in California elementary and middle schools. But even that obvious step was fought by big business. High schools, where far more soda pop is consumed, were exempted. Now she's pushing a bill that would require restaurants to provide nutritional information about the meals—much like food producers are required to list the ingredients and nutritional content of everything inside the package.

That bill is also being fought by Big Food (which is pretty ironic, when you consider that the only grounds for these fast food lawsuits is that customers claim that the restaurants are hiding nutritional information. Providing such information, as Ortiz wants, could actually insulate restaurants from such lawsuits).

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Okay, so you don't like the idea of the "fat tax" or government regulations? Fine. Get fat. But is it too much to ask that government do something simple like limiting the kinds of advertising your kids are seeing? According to the Kaiser Family Foundation  (hey, it has the word "family" in its name, so it can't be some kind of liberal group because everyone knows liberals are anti-family!), kids see twice as many ads as they did in the 1970s—and that most of those ads are for candy, processed cereal and fast food.  Not surprisingly, kids are also three times more likely to be overweight than those who grew up in the 1970s.

As a result, groups like the American Psychological Association (possibly a liberal front group because we all know how liberal wack jobs like Woody Allen revere psychoanalysis) urged the U.S. government to restrict ads aimed at children under 8 because kids that young are particularly vulnerable to commercial persuasion.

But the same people who want to restrict Howard Stern's ability to talk dirty want to allow America's fast food industry to sell dirty.

And that's the larger issue here: Our nation seems to have no shortage of right-wingers screaming about the moral decay in our society. Why is there no outrage about the nutritional version? Could it be because moral decay is caused by Hollywood liberals who tend to favor government programs while nutritional decay is caused by cattlemen, conglomerates and cheese producers who tend to vote Republican and abhor government regulation?

Did I just go after the cheese industry? I did, but with good reason. While everyone likes to believe that McDonald's now-extinct supersized fries caused the nation's zipper to bust over the past three decades, you could easily blame cheese consumption, which has doubled—from 15 pounds per person per year to 30—since 1975, says Dr. Neal Barnard of the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine.

The son and grandson of cattlemen, Barnard nonetheless has no sympathy for the "personal responsibility" argument. "It's complete crap," he told me. "These food producers can engineer an obesity epidemic by simply lobbying the government."

No, Americans didn't suddenly rediscover their love of cheese by themselves. Years ago, the biggest dairy producers lobbied the government for a program that taxes all dairy producers—big or small—and uses the money to promote this vital American industry. The results, according to Barnard,  were ads like "Got Milk" or cross-promotions with Pizza Hut on something called the "Ultimate Cheese Lover's Pizza," which has a pound of cheese on every pie. Thanks to money collected by the United States government, the cheese industry was even able to convince the Subway sandwich chain to get rid of the two sandwiches on their menus that did not have cheese.  

And Barnard's group sued the USDA in 2000 after discovering that six of the 11 people who were in charge of reconfiguring the nation's dietary guidelines (all those "recommended daily allowances" of thiamine, iron and vitamins that you see on the side of food packages) had ties to the meat, egg or dairy industry. (What's he complaining about? After all, six of 11 members having ties to the industries they're supposed to be regulating is practically open government compared to Vice President Cheney's energy panel.) "It's bad enough that none of the panelists were from healthy food industries, but you don't need to have anyone from big business at all. There are plenty of impartial experts at the CDC or the NIH," he said.

But those impartial guys might make proposals that would actually shake things up, like proposing the outright ban of foods with trans-fatty acids or hydrogenated oils, which Big Food uses because they're cheaper and extend shelf lives.

"The question is, can the government control these industries or will it continue to be controlled by them?" Barnard asked. "Big Food industries are like the cocaine industry in Colombia. They hawk their product and have political power."

Gersh Kuntzman is also Brooklyn Bureau Chief of the New York Post. His website is at http://www.gersh.tv

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