Politics

Drew Carey on Obama’s obesity initiative: ‘You can’t make people be healthy’ [VIDEO]

Nicholas Ballasy Senior Video Reporter
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Comedian and host of “The Price Is Right” Drew Carey told The Daily Caller that First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign and related health initiatives cannot “make people be healthy.” Throughout his childhood, Carey said he “never paid attention” to recommendations from the president or his physical fitness council, stressing that weight issues are “so personal.”

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TheDC asked Carey, who has lost over 80 pounds, about the Obama administration’s effort through the “Let’s Move” campaign to move nutrition labels from the back of products to the front.

“Just give me something I can read. I don’t care where it is, honestly,” Carey told TheDC on October 28.

“You can’t make people be healthy, you know, but I don’t care where the label is, I just want to be able to get the information, that’s all.”

Carey said health decisions should be left up to individuals, not the federal government.

“When I was a kid, I never paid attention to what the president or the president’s physical fitness council and all that stuff when they come to your school, I never paid any attention to that stuff and I think when you go to lose weight and when you want to do something like that, it’s so personal,” he told TheDC.

“I don’t think interviews with me do any good, I don’t think anybody pushing it, it might help, people say it helps so I’ve got to take their word for it but I think when you get to a point in your life when you’re just sick of being the way you are and you want to make a positive change, I think that’s what has to happen. It’s such a personal individual thing. I didn’t start losing weight because I read an interview with somebody and they inspired me, that’s for sure, it was just because I was sick of being fat.”

Carey, a former Marine, was in Washington to run his first Marine Corps Marathon.

When asked by TheDC about federal dietary guidelines, Carey said, “if the government’s, whoever’s footing the bill, if they decide what’s on the menu that should be their business and if you don’t like it, you can buy your own…I’d like to see people eating healthier and stuff but like I said it’s all an individual decision.”

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