Never mind the obesity epidemic—Canada is (31) with an epidemic of bad ideas on how to fight obesity. The latest is to treat fast-food restaurants as if they were (32) to porn shops, and (33) them from—or at least limit their numbers in—neighbourhoods with schools or hospitals.
That idea is one of many (34) by a group of medical doctors in an article published this week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The doctors, (35) by the cardiologist Mark Eisenberg of McGill University, seem to view a bag of potato chips as the moral (36) of a package of cigarettes. They (37) propose the use of graphic warnings for junk food, similar to (38) on cigarette packages," which now have pictures of a dying cancer (39) on them. They would discuss a (40) on junk foods. Salt they suggest removing from processed foods not (41) , so that no one notices, but fast enough to destroy the enticing taste.
There is a logical end to this kind of thinking: men skulking on street corners (42) hamburgers under their trench coats, even as a massive bureaucracy decides how to separate junk foods from (43) ones, for the purposes of launching a fusillade of taxes. (The authors even envision a utopia in which people snack on "trail mix, apple slices and granola bars. ")
Canada does not need a dietitian-in-chief. It doesn’t need healthy-food enforcement officers. People in a democracy should be (44) to make bad choices, even ones as reprehensible as scarfing chips or swilling sugary pop. These choices are different from cigarette smoking, which creates (45) effects on others. A. them B. that C. what D. those

After Zember rinsed with a raspberry-flavored acetic solution, Balanoff inserted a ViziLite light stick into his patient’s mouth. Suddenly, a tiny white lesion became visible on the side of Zember’s tongue. "It was tiny, but I couldn’t explain it away," says Balanoff, since Zember had no history of canker sores that could have left such a mark. Zember, 78, did have a history of smoking, though, which put him at higher risk for oral cancer. So Balanoff referred him to an oral surgeon to have the lesion checked out. A biopsy revealed the cells were cancerous. "It was so tiny, I might not have noticed it until a year or a year and a half later [once it had grown]," says Balanoff. "By then, it would have been a stage-three cancer, and his chances wouldn’t have been that good."About 30,000 Americans will be diagnosed with oral or pharyngeal cancer this year, and more than 8,000 people will die from it. The death rate--about 50 percent over five years--hasn’t changed much in the past few decades, in part because the cancer often isn’t detected until it’s visible to the naked eye. "Probably about two thirds of the cases at the time of diagnosis and treatment are already at an advanced stage," says Sol Silverman, a professor of oral medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and an oral-cancer spokesman for the American Dental Association. "So what can we do today Early detection."
Over the past few years, the American Dental Association has made detecting oral cancer earlier a priority, launching an awareness campaign in 1999. But it’s taken a little while for the new screening tools to catch on. ViziLite, manufactured by Phoenix--based Zila Pharmaceuticals, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in November 2001, but not widely marketed until this year. Another device, OralCDx’s oral-brush biopsy, which uses a specialized brush to collect several test ceils from the tongue’s surface, has been available since 2000. But it was only this year that Delta Dental Plan of Michigan and its affiliated plans in Ohio and Indiana became one of the nation’s first dental benefits providers to include the diagnostic tool, distributed by Sullivan-Schein Dental, as part of its standard benefits ( DaimlerChrysler was the first employer group to incorporate the benefit for it’s 400,000 union workers).
Soon there may be another option, too. Zila’s OraTest, a patented five-minute mouth rinse that uses a special dye, has already been approved for use in more than a dozen other countries, but still awaits approval from the FDA.

A new report on children’s inactivity suffers from a similar flaw. Active Healthy Kids Canada complains that 72 percent of youth from the age of 5 to 19 do not have (46) to after-school programs. But why should 19-year-olds, or even the bulk of 14-year-olds, need such regimentation The attitude seems to be that only the government can (47) children from bad habits. How the state is supposed to program the pounds off today’s children is not explained.
Demonizing smoking is very different from demonizing obesity, (48) is a condition, not a behaviour. It is influenced by (49) factors. Shaming and blaming, taxing and banning, will not work. We need to promote greater (50) , at all ages, and all weights, and keep in mind that the heavy hand of the state is not the answer to every ill.