Obesity too widespread to go without attention

It’s official: Eating fattening food, coupled with a sedentary lifestyle, can be just as deadly over time as smoking cigarettes. The latest research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has concluded that obesity is quickly catching up with tobacco-related illnesses as the nation’s most dangerous public health scourge.

It’s official: Eating fattening food, coupled with a sedentary lifestyle, can be just as deadly over time as smoking cigarettes. The latest research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has concluded that obesity is quickly catching up with tobacco-related illnesses as the nation’s most dangerous public health scourge. The statistics are truly alarming. After analyzing preventable causes of death from 2000, the CDC found that of the roughly 1.2 million premature deaths that year, 435,000 were linked directly to tobacco use, or about 18 percent of the total. By comparison, 400,000 deaths, about 17 percent, were attributed to obesity and a lack of exercise. A decade earlier, the figures were 19 percent and 14 percent respectively. At this rate, experts predict that obesity will soon surpass tobacco use as the nation’s leading cause of preventable illness and death. In response to the mounting crisis, Tommy Thompson, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has promised a high-profile campaign urging Americans to alter their dietary and lifestyle choices.While that makes sense, Thompson may have a difficult time making sure the message is heard: The food industry spends $30 billion a year on advertising while the federal government spends a measly $10 million telling us to eat our veggies and exercise more. Big Food — restaurateurs, manufacturers, processors and the like — hasn’t been shy about throwing its money and its weight around. They’re rightfully concerned that they’ll be targeted by the same types of lawsuits and multibillion-dollar settlements that have ravaged the tobacco industry. To avoid a similar public relations and financial calamity, the industry has been lobbying Congress and local legislatures for help with the heavy lifting; and their efforts are already paying dividends. Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted in favor of a so-called “cheeseburger bill” that would shield fast-food restaurants and others in the industry from lawsuits brought by corpulent consumers who may blame the establishments for making them fat. Georgia lawmakers are considering similar state legislation that would ban lawsuits against food and beverage companies for obesity-related health problems. There are obvious differences between food industry and tobacco companies, which willfully misled the public for years. At first they claimed their products were healthy, then they stubbornly denied their products caused lung cancer and other respiratory illnesses despite indisputable scientific evidence to the contrary. So legislative efforts to bar plaintiffs from suing the food industry are misguided. Only a few such suits have been brought and none of them have been successful. If the cases are without merit, that determination should be made by judges, not by activist legislators.That’s not to say that the industry should be let off the hook. Restaurants, especially large fast-food chains, have failed in their responsibility to offer their customers healthier fare, or to at least warn them about the caloric and fat content of some of the most popular menu items. The nation’s schools aren’t blameless, either. Strapped for cash, many of them have allowed companies to install vending machines in school hallways and lunchrooms where students, many of whom aren’t getting adequate physical exercise, spend their days loading up on sweet, salty and fatty snacks.As a result, today’s overweight children are 20 percent to 30 percent heavier than children were 10 years ago. More of them are being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes — once called adult-onset diabetes — and risking complications such as blindness, nerve damage, kidney failure and lower-leg amputations. A recent study found that American children are the fattest on the planet. But there’s another factor often overlooked in the obesity epidemic that deserves more attention. The neighborhoods where many Americans live, especially those here in metro Atlanta, are too often designed to promote vehicular travel, but discourage walking and other forms of physical activity. Any serious policy initiatives to reduce the growing risks of obesity-related disease and death will be incomplete unless they include ways to make our physical environment healthier, as well.(Source: Atlanta Health Journal, March 2004)