Businesses are in business to make money. They don’t typically care if the customer’s money is coming from individuals or government.

Andrew Desiderio reports at The College Fix.

GWU Prof Calls Out First Lady’s Anti-Obesity Group for Link to Big Business

First Lady Michelle Obama’s effort to end childhood obesity includes partnerships with big food corporations, and one Washington D.C. scholar says that’s not the way to win the war.

“Corporations are in the business to make money, whether they sell Cheez Whiz or Cheez Whiz Light,” states George Washington University associate professor of sociology Ivy Ken in a recently published study. “When that goal is threatened, they engage in issues management using both structural and discursive strategies.”

In other words, Big Food will play the game, so to speak, to appear as if they are striving to make their food healthier to curry favor with the public, but according to Ken, those efforts mostly amount to rhetoric and half measures.

Making matters worse, Michelle Obama’s Partnership for a Healthier America, as well as former President Bill Clinton’s Alliance for a Healthier Generation, blame consumers instead of the corporate makers of unhealthy foods, Ken argues.

These two organizations “turn overweight and obese people into idiots” by treating them as if they “do not know any better than to make bad choices,” Ken wrote in her study: “A Healthy Bottom Line: Obese Children, a Pacified Public, and Corporate Legitimacy.”

“Michelle Obama does not think people are idiots,” Prof. Ken said in an interview with The College Fix. “What’s at issue here are food companies, and the tactics they use to deal with the issue of obesity in a way that allows them to maintain legitimacy.”

Nevertheless, Michelle Obama’s own words appear to counteract that in a recent interview with MSN.com, in which she said her Harvard and Princeton education couldn’t even help her feed her kids right.