Currently browsing posts about: Obesity

City University and the Public Health Association of New York City have just released their long-awaited report, “Reversing the Diabetes and Obesity Epidemics in New York City: A Call to Action.”  The report focuses on public health–rather than individual–causes of these problems and makes recommendations about how to change the environment to make it more conducive to eating better (less, I call it) and moving more.   It’s a good place to go for data on the extent of these problems.  Enjoy (?)

Glaxo, the company that makes Alli (a.k.a. Xenical), says it has sold 2 million packages of the diet drug since June when the FDA approved over-the-counter sales. How did Glaxo do this? In interesting ways, says the Wall Street Journal.

The New York Times says the company says 70% of people taking the drug say they are losing weight. Maybe so, but under some coercion. Eat too much fat while taking the drug and you can expect some messy side effects.  There has to be a better way….

Personal responsibility won’t do the trick. A new report from the U.K. government describes the extent of environmental influences on obesity and warns that fixing the problem requires major intervention and is likely to take decades. Worth reading, no?

In case you missed CNN’s weekend investigative report on America’s obesity epidemic, you get another chance online. I was interviewed for it and appear for 5 seconds right at the beginning. I’m always suspicious of programs that show lots of pictures of overweight people (with heads discreetly cut off); they usually miss key points as well as being insensitive. I’m curious to know what you thought of it. CNN went to a lot of trouble to do all those interviews and all that filming. What did you learn from it? Do tell.

I am indebted to Joel Moskowitz of UC Berkeley’s Center for Family and Community Health for passing along this amazing series of debates from the L.A. Times. This week, Kelly Brownell (a psychologist at Yale) and Paul Campos (a lawyer from Colorado) debate whether rising rates of obesity even exist let alone constitute a cause for concern. The debates were published over the course of a week: September 17, September 18, September 19, September 20. Enjoy (?). Decide for yourself.

My latest interview with Eating Liberally is about the policy implications of the “F is for Fat” study (see earlier post).

A comment on my August 15 post, “Playing With Obesity Maps” (click on Obesity), asks: “…can you “weigh in” on…the fact is that the nation’s getting fatter even though there’s so much information available out there that should make these numbers go down instead of up?”

Sure. Happy to. We like to think that knowing what to do to stay healthy would be enough to make us do it and it would be great if it did. But mere mortals need more help than that. That’s why the social environment is such an important influence on what we do. Right now, we have a social environment that encourages us to eat more (larger portions! food everywhere!) and move less (computers! remotes! cars! elevators!). As individuals, we fight society when we try to eat less and move more. So education, which is easy to do, rarely turns out to be enough. We have to change society–and that, of course, is not so easy, not least because doing so runs up against a lot of vested interests.

The Robert Wood Johnson report on climbing rates of obesity awards the prize to Mississippi as the first state to reach 30% of the population as overweight. The most distressing finding: rates are rising in one-fourth of the states, with the highest rates in the south. What to do? “Make healthy choices easy choices,” says the report. Good idea: make it easier for everyone to eat less or better and to move more.

And here’s what the New York Times had to say about this.