Global food cops.

ITEM: In a June 7 special issue, "Overcoming Obesity in America," Time magazine asked: "How would the Federal Government fund a national campaign for healthier eating? Once again, the obesity warriors want to steal a leaf from the tobacco wars: if you want people to use less of something, put a tax on it...."

"A tax on junk foods? A bah on advertising to tots? A national nutrition campaign advising us all to eat less? Could any of this actually happen?" Certainly, answered Time, citing "obesity warriors" such as health economist Kenneth Warner, director of the University of Michigan Tobacco Research Network. Warner remembers when the world thought it was everyone's personal responsibility to cut down on smoking and when the government had little to say on the matter In many ways, he says, where we are in fighting obesity today is similar to where we were with cigarettes in the early '60s...."

BETWEEN THE LINES: We are being forcefed this campaign on many fronts. Consider Supersize Me, a well-publicized film by a man who ate only McDonald's food for a month and gained 25 pounds. The film garnered the best-documentary-director prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The meaning of the movie, says director Morgan Spurlock, is that "fast food is as addictive as any drug." (There was much less publicity when Soso Whaley of the Competitive Enterprise Institute ate at McDonald's for a month, losing 10 pounds and lowering her cholesterol 40 points. She also made a documentary--and wiser food choices.)

As usual, the urgency is overblown. One prominent researcher at Rockefeller University, Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, acknowledges that, while there are more obese Americans, the population's average weight has increased only 7-10 pounds since 1991.

But if a seeming crisis can be generated, government often expands. Thus, as the Boston Globe reported, the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration wants to supersize what's on Washington's plate: "Federal health officials are considering placing warning labels on packages of foods deemed unhealthy by government scientists, perhaps the most far-reaching proposal in the unfolding government campaign to shrink the American waistline."

Lawmakers are extolling "fat taxes," the Transportation Department's appropriation supposedly promotes exercise for children, and President Bush's latest budget has $200 million to fight obesity. Congress is also contemplating menu labeling legislation, says the Cato Institute's Radley Balko, "which would force restaurants to send every menu item to the laboratory for nutritional testing."

This meddling, which fattens the burgeoning federal deficit, is also going global. An International Obesity Task Force has been spawned. The radical Center for Science in the Public Interest lobbied the World Health Organization to endorse so-called Twinkie taxes and further restrictions on food choices. WHO, an arm of the United Nations, would love to become a global food cop, and is plumping for the first world treaty on diet, physical activity and health.