Russian Leftists Want to Put Scary Photos on Junk Food Labels

Every country that has to deal with the global "exploding nightmare" of childhood obesity is doing it in its own way.

Mexico is taxing sugary drinks, France is banning unlimited soda refills, and Arab countries are hawking vegan snack bars.

Russia, for its part, may soon be resorting to good ol' fashioned fear to get kids to cut down on eating junk food. Those measures would include legally requiring soda- and potato-chip makers to put graphic photos of diseases caused by junk food consumption on labels, according to Russia Today.

Confronted with the harsh reality that Russia has the fourth-highest rate of diabetes in the world, Oleg Mikheyev, a Lower House MP from the left-leaning Fair Russia party, has proposed a more creative and scary approach.

"People know that sugar can cause type-2 diabetes, but few of them actually know what the trophic ulcers look like. Same goes for kidney stones that appear because of excessive consumption of salty foods or cholesterol plaques," Mikheyev reportedly wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

According to Russia Today, the idea dates back to 2014, when another group of lawmakers proposed slapping "threatening" labels on hamburger, French fry, and soda labels.

But the fact that a Russian MP has proposed bold legislation hardly makes the passing of a bill a sure thing. In fact, a couple of years ago, Mikheyev, the very same MP who wrote this open letter to Medvedev proposed legislation that would make high heels illegal due to his claim that 40 percent of Russians suffered from flat feet.

"Footwear should have heels that are two to four centimeters high, five centimeters high at the most," Mr. Mikheyev said in the proposal, the Christian Science Monitor reported. "The harmful effects of wearing extremely high heels and flat shoes have now been recognized by experts of the entire world. It's necessary to change this trend."

But given Russia's contempt of the West and use of food to fight a war of minds, it's not surprising that fast food has also become part of the Motherland's national identity, with President Vladimir pushing to create a Russian equivalent of McDonald's called "Let's Eat at Home!" to reduce dependence on Western brands.

Nationalistic puns aside, the simultaneous embrace and rejection of fast food shows that Russia has the very same ambivalent relationship with junk food as those in the decadent West. Maybe we're not so different after all.