One way in which the Nanny State will gain power to control more of your lives is through government health-care coverage.

If obesity causes higher health-care costs, and if the government finances health-care coverage, then people will begin to argue that—to keep government expenditures down—obese people should be forced to exercise more, change their food intake, or otherwise lose their coverage.

It’s one of the reasons that Nanny Statists love the concept of a government-controlled medical system; it’s a sneaky way of vastly increasing the power of the Nanny State.

The hysteria over global warming may give Nanny Statists another excuse to control our lives:

[I]n a letter published Friday in the medical journal Lancet, two scientists write that obese people are disproportionately responsible for high food prices and greenhouse gas emissions because they consume 18% more food energy due to their greater body mass — and require increased quantities of fuel to transport themselves and the food they eat. “Promotion of a normal distribution of BMI would reduce the global demand for, and thus the price of, food,” write the authors[.]