Most Americans endorse public efforts to reduce childhood
obesity but don't want to do so through taxes or regulation, a
new survey reveals. Almost 91 percent of those surveyed thought
parents "have a lot of responsibility" for childhood obesity,
with only 16 percent saying the government holds a significant
amount of responsibility, according to the report in the
American Journal of Preventive Medicine. People could list
multiple sources of responsibility. "The public clearly wants to
reduce unhealthy, and increase healthy, food consumption among
children and adolescents. However, they are wary about
accomplishing these goals through intensive regulation or
taxation" say W. Douglas Evans, Ph.D., and colleagues at RTI
International, a North Carolina not-for-profit research
institute. For instance, the survey participants generally
supported ideas like restricting the availability of unhealthy
foods in school vending machines and cafeterias but they opposed
raising the costs of these foods or implementing a "j