BiographyKelly Brownell is a Yale psychologist on a decade-long crusade against what he calls America’s “toxic food environment.” Brownell wants to “hit junk-food junkies where it hurts: in their wallets” by “slapping high-fat, low-nutrition food with a substantial government ‘sin’ tax.” He is best known for having first proposed the infamous “Twinkie tax.”
Brownell demonizes restaurants and food producers, hoping that they will one day face “the same social climate that has enveloped the tobacco companies.” He serves on the scientific advisory board of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), the undisputed leader among America’s activist dietary scolds.
Brownell believes that governments should regulate all food advertisements seen by children, ban high-calorie and high-fat foods (and all soda pop) from schools, and -- to pay for it all -- slap punitive taxes on the foods that he considers “bad.” He has admitted, however, that the real motive behind such taxes is to increase the cost of high-calorie foods to the point where they will be priced out of the public’s reach.
Brownell places the blame for obesity squarely on food providers, but he should know better from his own experience. In November of 2002, the Associated Press reported that he “sports a good-sized paunch thanks, he says, to a book project that has kept him relatively sedentary and snack-prone for the last year or so.”
Brownell is perfectly willing to trample individual rights when it serves his ends. Writing in CSPI’s Nutrition Action Healthletter, Brownell wrote: “I recommend we develop a militant attitude about the toxic food environment, like we have about tobacco … [smoking] became so serious that society overlooked the intrusion on individual rights for the greater social good.”
Background
Scientific Advisory Board member, Center for Science in the Public Interest; Professor of psychology, Yale University; Director, Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders; Past president, Society of Behavioral Medicine
Associated Organizations and Foundations
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