Norway: Smoke, Drink and Eat What You Want, Norway’s Public Health Minister Says
By Palko Karasz
May 10, 2019
It was a most unusual message from a health official: People should be allowed to eat, drink and smoke as they see fit.
Norway’s new minister in charge of public health said this week that adults did not need government lectures about what to put in their bodies, but it sounded a bit like she was telling people to go ahead and indulge. Critics protested that her remarks were damaging, particularly coming from someone in her position.
“I think people should be allowed to smoke, drink and eat as much red meat as they like,” Sylvi Listhaug, the government’s minister for the elderly and public health, said in an interview posted on Monday on the website of NRK, Norway’s state broadcaster. “The government may provide information, but I think people in general know what is healthy and what is not.”
The interview was published just three days after she took over the ministry, and it was dotted with the kind of sharp, controversial comments Ms. Listhaug, deputy leader of the right-wing, anti-immigration Progress Party, is known for.
As immigration minister, she made headlines in 2017 with disparaging comments about Sweden, saying that Norway should not become like its neighbor, which was accepting more refugees. Last year, she resigned as justice minister after comments about terrorists she made on Facebook threatened to bring down the government.
This week, opposition politicians and health advocates promptly denounced Ms. Listhaug’s comments on habits that are major risk factors for many serious diseases.
“I fear that this will set public health efforts back for decades, and that this will compromise the general understanding among Norwegians of the health consequences of tobacco and alcohol use,” Anne Lise Ryel, secretary general of Norway’s Cancer Society, said in a statement.
She called for public health to be removed from Ms. Listhaug’s portfolio, saying that “she seems to lack understanding of what public health really means and what her role as minister in that area should be.”
In a statement of her own, emailed on Friday, Ms. Listhaug said, “The government believes that people have to take responsibility for their own life, but the government has to make sure that everyone can make healthy and informed choices.”