On The Caloric Content of a Snickers

We recently returned from four days in Savannah, GA, a trip largely defined by extended stops at places of refreshment and gastronomy lightly interspersed with medium length strolls through the city. It wasn’t intentionally a gastronomical vacation but the food choices in the the town were certainly one of the highlights. This morning was the first time I was actually hungry in probably five days and I had to skip dinner last night to even make that possible. We ate shrimp and grits, pizza, kabobs, quiches, steaks, lobster stuffed raviolis, scallop fettuccines, fried chicken, barbecued pork, macaroni and cheese, mashed-fried and scalloped potatoes, famous ice cream, fried peach bread pudding, crawfish beignets with Tabasco syrup, shrimp po’boys and who knows what else that can’t be remembered right now. I drank my weight in Sweetwater 420 and assorted other large, hoppy beers. The total caloric value of the trip would feed a small developing nation for a week.

The good news is we didn’t eat out of a vending machine once which is fortunate since apparently the fact that vending machines don’t inform the consumer of the caloric content of a Hershey’s bar is a critical factor in the rising obesity epidemic as far as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) authors are concerned. You see, a little known tidbit in the ACA is a new rule that mandates all vending machine companies that operate more than 20 machines display the calorie information of the snacks being dispensed the idea being that if we could only get obese people to reduce their weekly caloric intake by 100 calories, the initial cost of $24 million to said companies would be netted out by $26 million in health care savings.

Essentially what the Obama administration has decided is that since we can’t seem to get people to make reasonable decisions about how many calories they take in on their own, we will need to find ways to consciously or subconsciously affect their choices at the expense of a niche market of very small business owners who can’t possibly be politically powerful. Seventy five percent of these companies have three or fewer employees. I don’t know what the profit margin is on Snickers bars from a vending machine but intuitively I doubt anyone is getting rich on their 20 vending machines. To arbitrarily single out a niche market like this is one of the worst things a government can do (and the easiest given the guaranteed political powerlessness that small companies have).

Let’s do a little math based on the known figures surrounding this new rule. The government estimates that if .02 percent of the obese adults in the country consumed 100 calories fewer each week, the reduced strain on the health care system would be monetarily greater than $24 million (the estimated costs of the changes dictated by the new vending machine law). There are 316 million citizens in the US of which approximately 237 million are adults. The obesity rate in the U.S. is 35.7% so there are 84 million obese adults in the U.S. The law is then hoping that 16,800 of them will walk up to a vending machine once a week, see that a PayDay has 135 calories in it and either buy something else with 35 calories in it (which based on my experience with vending machine contents would have to be a roll of LifeSavers) or skip the candy bar entirely. Who thinks this is a good idea? Who sits around in a committee meeting and says “let’s put the caloric intake of each item in a vending machine on the machine somehow which will certainly cause people to not eat out of a vending machine”?

This is the problem with all governments eventually. The current one is just a step farther down the road of paternalistic nanny state than the last one and the last one before that. Little decisions are made by career politicians who forget that every single regulation and law they put on the books actually has effects, both the ones they intend (though really, in this case, I have a hard time believing this regulation is going to result in $26 million in health care savings) and the ones they never seem to even consider in their insular little idealistic bubble. We need more people who are willing to run vending machine businesses despite long odds and fewer people who think vending machines are the cause of any particular health problem. Sadly the former will soon be legislated and sin taxed out of business and we’ll all still be fat, unhappy and without Twinkies.