"It's not my fault I'm fat, evolution made me do it!"

Last week His Majesty Bloomberg, King of New York City announced a planned ban on normal sized overly large sugary drinks in an effort to combat obesity. His plan is to block the sale of any sugary drink over 16 ounces (Unless it's a milkshake, fruit juice, diet soda, or simply a refill on the first 16 oz sale. Or if the soda is sold in a grocery store. Then it's A-okay) throughout the city, in order to bring down the approximately 50% obesity rate in his city.

“Obesity is a nationwide problem, and all over the United States, public health officials are wringing their hands saying, ‘Oh, this is terrible,’ ” Mr. Bloomberg said in an interview on Wednesday in City Hall’s sprawling Governor’s Room.

“New York City is not about wringing your hands; it’s about doing something,” he said. “I think that’s what the public wants the mayor to do.”

If you're curious how much of the "public" the mayor is referring to supports his plan, check out this poll at the Huffington post. Even at the good ol' HuffPo, this measure only garners a 31% approval rating. Clearly such an unpopular measure that unequivocally slices into the consumer freedoms of New Yorkers should not stand, right?

"Not so fast!" shouts Dr. Daniel Lieberman, professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. He claims that coercive action taken by the government is not just necessary, it's natural.

Lessons from evolutionary biology support the mayor’s plan: when it comes to limiting sugar in our food, some kinds of coercive action are not only necessary but also consistent with how we used to live.

Obesity’s fundamental cause is long-term energy imbalance — ingesting more calories than you spend over weeks, months and years. Of the many contributors to energy imbalance today, plentiful sugar may be the worst.

Since sugar is a basic form of energy in food, a sweet tooth was adaptive in ancient times, when food was limited. However, excessive sugar in the bloodstream is toxic, so our bodies also evolved to rapidly convert digested sugar in the bloodstream into fat.

Simply put, humans evolved to crave sugar, store it and then use it. For millions of years, our cravings and digestive systems were exquisitely balanced because sugar was rare. Apart from honey, most of the foods our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate were no sweeter than a carrot. The invention of farming made starchy foods more abundant, but it wasn’t until very recently that technology made pure sugar bountiful.

Who is to blame, then? Is it people unable to control their base urges? Don't be silly! It's those evil corporations!

The food industry has made a fortune because we retain Stone Age bodies that crave sugar but live in a Space Age world in which sugar is cheap and plentiful. Sip by sip and nibble by nibble, more of us gain weight because we can’t control normal, deeply rooted urges for a valuable, tasty and once limited resource.

That's right. They are taking advantage of you, taking advantage of the fact that your great^100th grandfather didn't have enough honey is his diet. Those bastards.

How do we fix this? Not by doing nothing or through education, he says.

The final option is to collectively restore our diets to a more natural state through regulations. Until recently, all humans had no choice but to eat a healthy diet with modest portions of food that were low in sugar, saturated fat and salt, but high in fiber. They also had no choice but to walk and sometimes run an average of 5 to 10 miles a day. Mr. Bloomberg’s paternalistic plan is not an aberrant form of coercion but a very small step toward restoring a natural part of our environment. 

We humans did not evolve to eat healthily and go to the gym; until recently, we didn’t have to make such choices. But we did evolve to cooperate to help one another survive and thrive. Circumstances have changed, but we still need one another’s help as much as we ever did. For this reason, we need government on our side, not on the side of those who wish to make money by stoking our cravings and profiting from them. We have evolved to need coercion.

Basically, his argument runs like this:

1. Humans evolved to really like sugar since we didn't have access to delicious Dr. Pepper in the past, and even if we did, we would have had to chase it down through the tundra and beat it with a stick before we could drink it.
2. Now that we've advanced to the point where we don't have trouble getting sugar, we no longer have the natural limitation to its intake, allowing us to practically bathe in the sugary goodness of Dr. Pepper.
3. Since there is no natural limitation, our craving for the 23 flavors of absolute perfection must be curbed by Big Brother.

 The biggest problem here is that this argument places the blame for a person's poor eating decisions not on themselves, but instead solely on evolutionary factors. Unfortunately there are all kinds of things that make evolutionary sense that we expect people to handle on their own.

Having sex with other people when you're in a committed relationship is generally frowned upon. Despite the fact that it makes evolutionary sense, we expect people to resist this urge on their own.

Also, I doubt very much that ancient man, while hunting down his elusive prey of Haagen Daz, had much to train him for handling credit card debt. If someone defaults on their loans due to their own incompetence (as opposed to, say, a medical disaster or something of that nature) we rightfully place the blame on them and expect them to handle it.

Then again, maybe the Mayor and Dr. Lieberman are both right.

Perhaps these overweight New Yorkers are just..."Too Big to Fail" .