As America's waistline expands and the anti-obesity movement gains momentum, what you eat may soon slip out of the private domain and into the public. Nobody will be regimenting your diet, but the government may start offering more pointed advice and regulating what goes into preprepared foods, among other things. Proposals include a tax on high-fat, low-nutrition food; better school meals; and nutrition labels on restaurant menus.

Having the government in your kitchen wouldn't be the first time private habits have come under outside scrutiny. Tobacco, alcohol, and drugs have all gone that route at various points in US history. But where did personal responsibility fall off the bandwagon?

The shift of private behavior to public oversight, with new legislation to enforce it, happens in a quantifiable way, says Rogan Kersh, political scientist at Syracuse University's Maxwell School, who is writing a book on the politics of obesity.

The first and most significant of several triggers, he explains, is social disapproval. For instance, "it used to be sexy and desirable to smoke.... [Now] you're committing some grave moral wrong."

As disapproval gains momentum, he says, "public health crusades start to build around these behaviors": Sometimes the science is accurate (the medical establishment is unanimous on the evils of smoking); sometimes the science is a mixed bag (some studies suggest that alcohol isn't as dangerous as the Prohibitionists claimed); and sometimes the science is completely spurious (Victorian physicians warned that too much sex would maim, blind, or kill).

Despite almost two thirds of Americans being overweight, the US is paradoxically one of the most antifat biased countries in the world. And that bias has only intensified in recent decades. Only a couple of brief periods in the 20th century showed a return to the acceptance of corpulence, Professor Kersh says, and both were after the world wars when Americans had undergone deprivation.

With social disapproval already widespread, medical science is reinforcing that view. Numerous studies and articles, some more alarmist than others, point to the health consequences of being heavy.

The message is no longer that being overweight is not good for you. It's now, "you're killing yourself through your obesity and the government must help you" to change, Kersh says.

That sort of shift in reasoning, reframing the problem in terms of a toxic food environment rather than weak will and failing personal responsibility, is key to the government stepping in. The individual is no longer blamed for not pushing back from the table. It's now a social problem.

What has helped accelerate that redefinition is the medical bill for dealing with weight-related illnesses, which reached $117 billion last year, according to the US surgeon general, and may soon surpass the toll on healthcare taken by smoking. "When something becomes an economic problem in this country, government tends to act in a more urgent way than if it's a different kind of problem like constitutional rights."

"The point is, even though I'm not obese I'm paying for people who are. This really burns Americans and they want their policymakers to act in response," Kersh says. Already, more than 140 anti-obesity laws have been introduced in state legislatures this year.

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