The Wiz's Weighty Proposals

Guided by a new study on causes of America's obesity crisis, your Unconventional Wiz has developed a plan that is virtually guaranteed to melt off the country's extra pounds:

· Get women out of the workplace and back into the kitchen.

· Substantially cut or eliminate taxes on cigarettes. Better yet, encourage smoking.

· Overturn state clean indoor air laws, perhaps as part of our Start Smoking -- Ask Me How! campaign.

Hey, I didn't say it was a good plan, did I? But it would work -- or at least that's the implication of research by economists Inas Rashad of Georgia State University, Michael Grossman of the City University of New York Graduate Center and Shin-Yi Chou of Lehigh University.

Of course Rashad and her colleagues are much too smart to propose that we sentence women to the kitchen, dump taxes on cigarettes or scrap indoor air laws. But their findings underscore how otherwise beneficial social trends and well-intended public policies can have unintended harmful consequences.

The current rise in obesity is a case in point. Since 1970, the percentage of obese Americans has doubled and the number of obese children has tripled. Health officials report that half the country is now overweight.

To understand the reasons for the rise, Rashad and her colleagues analyzed various national and state data, including the results of three separate health and nutrition surveys conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control between 1971 and 1994.

Their main finding? The weight gain tracks the proliferation of restaurants and fast-food places. In a 15-year period ending in 1997, the number of restaurants per capita increased by a whopping 61 percent.

But that raises another question: What's behind the restaurant explosion? One big cause, they argue, is that there are many more women in the paid labor force today than in the 1970s and thus fewer at home preparing presumably more healthful (or at least lower-calorie) meals. "There is now a time cost for preparing meals at home," Rashad said.

It is a price that working women and men seem reluctant to pay. "People would rather work more hours in order to go out to eat" instead of coming home to fix a healthy meal after a hard day at work, Rashad said. "There are tradeoffs. Obviously women entering the workforce is positive, but that does not mean there were not unintended negative consequences."

National efforts to cut smoking, as well as indoor air laws, also had the unintended consequence of putting inches on America's waistline because "smoking tends to increase metabolism and suppress appetite," Rashad wrote in a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.