Currently browsing posts about: Obesity

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.

I’ve just been sent a YouTube link to the Peter Jennings special of a few years ago (2004?) titled “How to get fat without even trying.” It’s a remarkable look at how food company marketing practices encourage obesity. This is not exactly an unbiased opinion, since I am in it. More than that, when he began our interview, Peter Jennings told me he had read my book, Food Politics, and was basing the program on it. I was so stunned by this that I can’t remember another word. I wish he was still with us.

The Center for Family and Community Health at UC Berkeley passes along information from RevolutionHealth about that site’s interactive maps that display the rise in rates of obesity in the United States from 1990 to 2006, for the entire United States, and by state. Watch the colors of the states get darker as the rates increase. Click on Texas and you can see the rates more than double from 12.3% to 26.1% of the population. But if you are from Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, or Nevada, you are out of luck; the maps have data for all states except those.

At last, some good news. Joel Moscowitz of the Center for Family and Community Health at Berkeley’s School of Public Health frequently sends out articles he has collected about obesity prevention. The latest is a “meta-analysis” (meaning an analysis of data collected from many research studies on the same topic) of 12 projects that use a combination of diet and physical activity to help school children lose weight. According to the authors of this article, published in the International Journal of Obesity, diet and activity work remarkably well, especially when families are involved. Doesn’t this seem promising?

The Spring 2007 issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics and the April 2007 issue of the Maryland Law Journal both have collections of excellent articles on childhood obesity. The articles talk about how to use laws and regulations to improve school food and restrict marketing of junk food to children, among other actions. Tired of waiting for food companies to make voluntary improvements? These articles provide lots of good ideas for encouraging companies to do what they promise.