No one knows whether there will be a 2012 farm bill, but we do know that it there is one, nutrition programs -- food stamps, school lunches, WIC, etc. -- will take up the lion’s share of farm bill funding, well in excess of $90 billion a year. But is the funding serving the neediest Americans? Find out on Thursday at AEI.

With no end to the obesity epidemic in sight, several states and cities have proposed soda taxes on sugar-sweetened soda and other beverages. At this conference, experts John E. Calfee of AEI and Jamie Chriqui of the University of Illinois at Chicago will analyze the evidence on soda taxes and other measures.

There is practically no reliable scientific support for using the soda tax to fight obesity. The tax is an impulse to generate new revenue and not a creative public health measure.

The rise in obesity has generated enormous popular interest and policy concern in developing countries, where it is rapidly becoming the major public health problem facing such nations.

In previous generations we had to devise solutions to deal with the dangers of tobacco and cars, and today we must learn how to combat the causes of obesity.

Technological developments have driven the obesity plague, but technological change may also be more successful at reducing obesity than attempts to change people's eating and exercising habits have been.

When "low fat" diets became the public health rage in the 1960s, it contradicted centuries of caution about too many carbohydrates.

Morgan Spurlock's documentarySuper Size Me is not a serious look at a real health problem, and it insteadsends the message that we are absolved ofresponsibility for our own fitness.