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RUSH: From Nanci Hellmich, USA Today, headline: “Obesity Could Affect 42% of Americans by 2030.” By the way, did I put this in the right order? I\u2019m asking myself the question. A story from yesterday, Snerdley, I told you about it. I didn\u2019t get to it. I didn\u2019t put it in the right order. Let me find it. I will find it. “A new forecast on obesity in America has health experts fearing a dramatic jump in health care costs if nothing is done to bring it under control.” Well, that opening sentence has so many See, I Told You So\u2019s in it that I don\u2019t know where to start. <\/p>\n
“The projection, released Monday, warns that 42% of Americans may end up obese by 2030, and 11% could be severely obese,” adding billions of dollars to health care costs. I want you to think again, folks. Take a moment here, seriously. I want you to ask yourself, how far back in your life do you have to go to remember whether or not you\u2019re overweight being a factor in federal health policy. I\u2019ll give you an example of what I mean. I\u2019ve always had a battle with weight. Roller coaster diet, I\u2019ve done it all. Every diet there is, I\u2019ve done it. I\u2019ve even made some up. And every time I have gotten to the point of thinking I need to lose weight, I have never once said I need to do this for my country. I\u2019ve never once said, “You know what? I\u2019m so overweight, this is gonna have a negative impact on my country\u2019s budget.” When was the last time you had that thought? <\/p>\n
Seriously, folks, when was the last time your weight made you stop and consider the impact of your weight on the federal budget and federal health costs? My guess is, never. My guess is you have never equated the two. Am I right? Until the past couple of years. Maybe some of you have pain-in-the-rear bosses who have told you that you need to lose weight because the health insurance policy doesn\u2019t cover people who are obese. Maybe you\u2019ve had some introduction to this. But my point is that whether or not you\u2019re overweight, which is as personal a matter as you can get, now your weight comes under the inspection authority of federal agents who have or will have the power to determine that your weight, if you are obese, has negative consequences. <\/p>\n
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Justin Trogdon, a research economist with RTI International, a non-profit organization in North Carolina\u2019s Research Triangle Park, said, “If nothing is done, it\u2019s going to hinder efforts for health care cost containment.” Guess what? The federal government is soon asserting power and rights over your weight — that means over what you eat — on the basis of controlling health care costs. Now, before Obamacare was voted on, you were warned that we were headed in this direction. Some people pooh-poohed the idea, “Come on, Rush, you\u2019re just being paranoid and extremist as always. They\u2019re concerned about your health.” Nope. It\u2019s gonna be an excuse to control your life. It\u2019s gonna be an excuse to exercise power over all of us. <\/p>\n
As of 2010, about 36% of adults were obese, which is roughly 30 pounds over a healthy weight. Six percent were severely overweight. Obese, that\u2019s a hundred or more pounds over a healthy weight. Eric Finkelstein, a health economist with the Duke University Global Health Institute, lead researcher on the new study, says, “The obesity problem is likely to get much worse without a major public health intervention.” Major public health intervention. <\/p>\n
Well, let\u2019s move on to the next story. I have it here right in my formerly nicotine-stained hand. Let me take a break. Let me give you the headline. It\u2019s in Reuters: “Obesity Fight Must Shift from Personal Blame — US Panel.” Obesity fight must shift from personal blame. So we have here a panel of federales who have opined that fighting obesity will no longer involve the obese. It\u2019s not personal. We are no longer going to blame the obese for obesity. No, there are other reasons, and those other reasons are an invitation to government to come in once again and take control over another aspect of your life.<\/p>\n
BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n
RUSH: Snerdley just asked me a good question: “Where does this story come from?” Excellent question. What happened is that a university professor decided to do a study. He probably got a federal grant. He went out and studied obesity, and he came up with a conclusion that calls for government intervention to fix the problem, and, voila! Anything calling for government intervention by a university professor after a study, that automatically qualifies as front-page news in a lifestyle paper like USA Today.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s how it happens. It\u2019s no different than that nutso group of vegetarians. By the way, you talk about flatulence? Have you ever been around vegetarians? I\u2019m telling you: It is undeniable, and it\u2019s something you want to avoid at all costs. But these clowns at the Center for Science in the Public Interest are just a bunch of busybodies who want to try to tell everybody else how to live. So they got a little icon, they got a logo, they got a fax machine. They did a study, they put it out, and it calls for government intervention and banning certain foods.<\/p>\n
The media says, “God, we love this: Government intervention!” It makes news. Same thing here. The Reuters story is simply their version of the same study that USA Today did the story on, and the Reuters story says “America\u2019s obesity epidemic is so deeply rooted that it will take dramatic and systematic measures from overhauling farm policies and zoning laws to possibly introducing a soda tax to fix it. This from the influential Institute of Medicine.” The Institute of Medicine! Wow, that sounds important! That\u2019s really influential.<\/p>\n
So did you know that you are getting fat because of zoning laws? Well, this study says so. And this study is 478 pages. “It refutes the idea that obesity is largely the result of a lack of willpower on the part of individuals.” So 478-page study calling for federal involvement, happens to coincidentally include the notion that “personal responsibility” is not a factor. Well, if personal responsibility is not a factor in losing weight, well, then who\u2019s gonna be in charge? Oh, yeah, the federal government!<\/p>\n
That\u2019s right, Obama!<\/p>\n
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This is some of the stuff they\u2019re studying. That\u2019s right! You\u2019d walk 20 miles to work, if there were sidewalks. But there\u2019s a shortage of sidewalks. We haven\u2019t invested in enough shovel-ready programs to build enough sidewalks. So you have no choice other than to sit in the car and get fat on the way to work. Now, the obesity study was paid for by the Centers for Disease Control. It was released at the Weight of the Nation Conference, w-e-i-g-h-t. The Weight of the Nation Conference was “a three-day meeting hosted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”<\/p>\n
The Weight of the Nation Conference.<\/p>\n
They actually had a bunch of people assemble at the Weight of the Nation Conference. So I\u2019m not making any of it up. All of this is, folks, why this regime has got to be defeated in November. This is why Obamacare has to be repealed. Every chance they get, they are taking personal responsibility out of the equation as the cause for anything. “You don\u2019t have a job? It\u2019s not because of you. No, no. It\u2019s \u2019cause rich people aren\u2019t hiring. They don\u2019t want to share their money.”<\/p>\n
There are any number of explanations for what\u2019s going wrong in your life — and, interestingly, you have nothing to do with any of it! You\u2019re nothing but a victim. Everybody\u2019s out to get you, and they are getting you. So you don\u2019t have a job, your house is underwater, and you\u2019re getting fat — and pretty soon you\u2019re gonna start emitting gas just like the dinosaurs did<\/a>, and the world is gonna end. Unless you agree to let the government come in and run your life. Actually, you won\u2019t have any say in the matter. You won\u2019t able to disagree.<\/p>\n BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n RUSH: So far in discussing obesity, we haven\u2019t discussed: Exactly who are they talking about? Now, as you are out about where you live, when you notice the obese, who are they?<\/p>\n Are you able to categorize them?<\/p>\n Are they mostly women?<\/p>\n Are they mostly men?<\/p>\n Are they “white Hispanics”?<\/p>\n Are they one-thirty-second squaws?<\/p>\n Who are they? So far, none of the stories that we\u2019ve discussed here have mentioned exactly who the obese are. Well, a very brave, courageous writer at the New York Times has tackled this one. She\u2019s Alice Randall. Alice Randall is an African-American woman. She wrote a piece that ran in the New York Times over the weekend. It might have run yesterday. I\u2019m not sure. No, it was a couple days ago. I guess it\u2019s Saturday or Sunday. And the title of her column is: Black Women and Fat.<\/p>\n Yes, there is a picture of the author. I didn\u2019t print it out. It\u2019s in the third page. I didn\u2019t print it out. I wouldn\u2019t consider her obese by virtue of her picture, but the government says 30 pounds overweight is obese. I\u2019m sorry, it\u2019s not. But, anyway: “Four out of five black women are seriously overweight,” says Alice Randall in the New York Times. “One out of four middle-aged black women has diabetes. With $174 billion a year spent on diabetes-related illness in America and obesity quickly overtaking smoking as a cause of cancer deaths, it is past time to try something new.<\/p>\n “What we need is a body-culture revolution in black America,” says Alice Randall in the New York Times, an African-American woman. Why do we need “a body-culture revolution in black America?” she asks. “Why? Because too many experts who are involved in the discussion of obesity don\u00c2\u2019t understand something crucial about black women and fat: many black women are fat because we want to be,” says Alice Randall in the New York Times. “The black poet Lucille Clifton\u00c2\u2019s 1987 poem ‘Homage to My Hips\u2019 begins with the boast, ‘These hips are big hips.\u2019<\/p>\n “She establishes big black hips as something a woman would want to have and a man would desire,” such as Sir Mix-A-Lot. “She wasn\u00c2\u2019t the first or the only one to reflect this community knowledge. Twenty years before, in 1967, Joe Tex, a black Texan, dominated the radio airwaves across black America with a song he wrote and recorded, ‘Skinny Legs and All.'” Do you remember that song, Snerdley? I played that song on the radio, Joe Tex. “One of his lines,” writes Alice Randall in the New York Times over the weekend, “haunts me to this day: ‘some man, somewhere who\u00c2\u2019ll take you baby, skinny legs and all.\u2019<\/p>\n “For me, it still seems almost an impossibility. Chemically, in its ability to promote disease, black fat may be the same as white fat. Culturally it is not. How many white girls in the \u00c2\u201960s grew up praying for fat thighs? I know I did,” writes Alice Randall in the New York Times. I\u2019m reading verbatim from the New York Times over the weekend. It\u2019s a column called Black Women and Fat by Alice Randall. Let me start this ‘graph again:<\/p>\n “How many white girls in the \u00c2\u201960s grew up praying for fat thighs? I know I did. I asked God to give me big thighs like my dancing teacher, Diane. There was no way I wanted to look like Twiggy, the white model whose boy-like build was the dream of white girls. Not with Joe Tex ringing in my ears,” Skinny Legs and All. “How many middle-aged white women fear their husbands will find them less attractive if their weight drops to less than 200 pounds? I have yet to meet one.<\/p>\n “But I know many black women whose sane, handsome, successful husbands worry when their women start losing weight. My lawyer husband is one” of these guys who does not want her to lose weight. “Another friend, a woman of color who is a tenured professor, told me…” See, folks, you didn\u2019t know that when obesity hit the news today that it was gonna end up here, did you? Alice Randall writing in the New York Times over the weekend, a piece called, Black Women and Fat.<\/p>\n “Another friend, a woman of color who is a tenured professor, told me that her husband, also a tenured professor and of color, begged her not to lose ‘the sugar down below\u2019 when she embarked on a weight-loss program. And it\u2019s not only aesthetics that make black fat different. It\u2019s politics too. To get a quick introduction to the politics of black fat, I recommend Andrea Elizabeth Shaw\u2019s provocative book ‘The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women\u2019s Unruly Political Bodies.\u2019<\/p>\n “Ms. Shaw argues that the fat black woman\u2019s body ‘functions as a site of resistance to both gendered and racialized oppression.\u2019 By contextualizing fatness within the African diaspora, she invites us to notice that the fat black woman can be a rounded opposite of the fit black slave, that the fatness of black women has often functioned as both explicit political statement and active political resistance.” Now, you might be asking, “Rush, what do you take from this?”<\/p>\n Well, it sounds to me like Alice Randall, Black Women and Fat, says that a svelte, fit, black woman has links to slavery because they were so overworked (mercilessly so) that they had no chance to get fat and that the fat black woman represents emancipation from slavery. That\u2019s what I hear Alice Randall writing over the weekend in the New York Times. Already we\u2019ve had several curious cultural references in this piece to the fact that black men like fat black women. She\u2019s attempting to explain why here. Her friend\u2019s husband told her, “Don\u2019t lose the sugar down below” if you go on a diet.<\/p>\n So, let me read this again: “By contextualizing fatness within the African diaspora, she invites us to notice that the fat black woman can be a rounded opposite of the fit black slave, that the fatness of black women has often functioned as both explicit political statement and active political resistance.” This is why I have warned you people: Don\u2019t try this at home. I make it look easy but it\u2019s not everybody who could understand this. It\u2019s not everybody who could break this down into its components and explain it to you, as I am doing here.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s continue. “When the biologist Daniel Lieberman suggested in a public lecture at Harvard this past February that exercise for everyone should be mandated by law, the audience applauded, the Harvard Gazette reported. A room full of thin affluent people applauding the idea of forcing fatties, many of whom are dark, poor and exhausted, to exercise appalls me,” writes Alice Randall in the New York Times. “Government mandated exercise,” writes Alice Randall, “is a vicious concept. But I get where Mr. Lieberman is coming from. The cost of too many people getting too fat is too high.”<\/p>\n But we need to hold on to the black “sugar down below.”<\/p>\n “I live in Nashville,” writes Alice Randall in the New York Times. “There is an ongoing rivalry between Nashville and Memphis. In black Nashville, we like to think of ourselves as the squeaky-clean brown town best known for our colleges and churches. In contrast, black Memphis is known for its music and bars and churches. We often tease the city up the road by saying that in Nashville we have a church on every corner and in Memphis they have a church and a liquor store on every corner.<\/p>\n “Only now the saying goes, there\u2019s a church, a liquor store and a dialysis center on every corner in black Memphis. The billions that we are spending to treat diabetes is money that we don\u2019t have for education reform or retirement benefits, and what\u2019s worse, it\u2019s estimated that the total cost of America\u2019s obesity epidemic could reach almost $1 trillion by 2030 if we keep on doing what we have been doing. WE have to change. Black women especially. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, blacks have 51% higher obesity rates than whites do.<\/p>\n “We\u2019ve got to do better.<\/p>\n “I\u2019ve weighed more than 200 pounds. Now I weigh less. It will always be a battle.” This is Alice Randall writing in the New York Times: “I call on every black woman for whom it is appropriate to commit to getting under 200 pounds or to losing the 10% of our body weight that often results in a 50% reduction in diabetes risk.” She\u2019s asking for this to happen, even though it will take her closer to the “fit black slave” link that she wishes to avoid, as previously expressed in this column, Black Women and Fat, by Alice Randall in the New York Times, which ran over the weekend.<\/p>\n So there you have it.<\/p>\n BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n RUSH: This Tom in South Holland, Illinois. Great to have you, sir, on the EIB Network. Hello.<\/p>\n CALLER: Good morning, Rush. How you doing?<\/p>\n RUSH: Good. Thanks much.<\/p>\n CALLER: Getting to the point about the insurance policies and the government trying to take control of it for many years. Thirty years ago I weighed 300 pounds. Twenty years ago I weighed about 160. Ten years ago I weighed 135. Today I weighed myself this morning, I\u2019m 201. I did this because I wanted to. I have a lot of self-control when I want to do things. I quit smoking 12 years ago. I did this all because I want a nice, healthy life as I get older, not sitting in a wheelchair with an oxygen mask strapped to my nose wondering where my health care is coming from. Well, you don\u2019t have to worry about your health care that much if you take care of yourself first. <\/p>\n And I\u2019ll tell you what, Rush, you\u2019re fighting the uphill battle against leftism. I admire you, and I respect you. I listen to you every day and I want to tell you one thing. I\u2019ve been in personal contact with a left-sided person, which is a friend of mine who walked up to me at a funeral about a year ago, looked at me and said, “Oh, my God.” He says, “You\u2019re 69. You look like you\u2019re 60 years old, if not younger. What do you do?” I said, “I take care of myself, exercise every day. I\u2019m at retirement age, but I still work 55 to 60 hours a week, and I take about 18 supplements a day.” Supplements meaning garlic capsules, stuff like that. He looked at me and says, “That\u2019s too much. You shouldn\u2019t be doing that.” I said, “You\u2019re about as left-leaning as you get without falling down. If you respect me and if you tell me that I look young and act young and feel young, why aren\u2019t you taking notes?” Because he\u2019s lefty.<\/p>\n RUSH: He doesn\u2019t approve of the way you\u2019re doing it. See, he knows better. Even though you\u2019re living it, he thinks he knows better than you do. But I\u2019m glad you called. This notion that weight loss or your job or anything is no longer a matter of personal responsibility, you\u2019re absolved. That\u2019s what this study on obesity says. It\u2019s not your fault. It\u2019s lack of sidewalks. It\u2019s other socioeconomic problems. It\u2019s just another invitation for government or busybodies like your left-leaning friend to come in and tell you how to do it right. <\/p>\n BREAK TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n RUSH: Here is Linda in Manhattan. Thanks for calling. I\u2019m glad you waited. Great to have you on the program. Hi.<\/p>\n CALLER: I thought it was interesting that you might like to know that the CDC knows this, too, that obesity in America has risen in direct inverse proportion to people quitting smoking.<\/p>\n RUSH: I did not know that, but it doesn\u2019t surprise me.<\/p>\n CALLER: And that\u2019s perfect for government interference. Government interferes in your life to force you to quit smoking, which then creates another problem that they want to interfere in your life to just stop. So it\u2019s never ending.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/live-rush-limbaugh.pantheonsite.io\/wp-content\/uploads\/ada-rules-13166670_large.jpg\"\/)
<\/a>RUSH: By the way, Alice Randall, I shoulda told you this. Alice Randall, who wrote the fat black women piece in the New York Times from which I just liberally quoted, is the writer in residence at Vanderbilt University. She once wrote a book, the title of which was, “Ada\u2019s Rules: A Sexy, Skinny Novel.” <\/a><\/p>\n
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