Obesity Epidemic May Cut U.S. Life Spans, Study FindsWe know what the problem is, now it is time for action.

It’s so easy to spew statistics. About two-thirds of Americans are overweight with about one-third obese. About 16 percent of children over 5 are obese and more than 10 percent of children ages 2 to 5 are overweight.

But what does that really mean? Well, children – our kids – may live 2 to 5 years fewer than adults today, reports The Washington Post. If so, obesity could wind up undoing two centuries of increasing life spans.

“The take-home message is that obesity clearly needs to be considered in an entirely new light – it is far more dangerous than we ever thought,” S. Jay Olshansky, a University of Illinois demographer who led the study, tells the Post.

Those who criticize the report have their heads buried deep into a bowl of ice cream. “I don’t think this is based on solid, scientific ground,” University of Virginia Professor Glenn Gaesser tells the Post. “It’s nonsensical, really.”

Come on professor, take a walk through the local mall or airport and tell me Americans look “healthy.” Don’t you know any families who are beset by weight-related health problems such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer? What about your students? Do they look as thin and healthy today as they did 15 years ago?

Do you really think it’s normal or healthy for 6-year-olds to be overweight, much less obese? Maybe your peers have a point you should listen to:

“Unless we do something, today’s younger generation will, for the first time in the modern era, experience shorter and less healthy lives than their parents,” Olshansky tells the Post.

While I haven’t read the study because it’s at the pay-for-read New England Journal of Medicine, it’s too bad the focus wasn’t on older American’s quality of life. Just because Americans are living 0.3 years longer in 2003 than 2002, as reported by CBS News, that doesn’t mean the elderly are healthy enough to enjoy their senior years.

And while this latest study provides additional evidence that the obesity epidemic is the biggest health-care crisis to face America in decades, policy-makers are still unwilling to make the big changes to fix what’s wrong in American culture.

So here are some of my ideas:

• Stop advertising junk food to kids, who are horribly susceptible to slick marketers. Arguments that parents can control their children’s exposure to media and counteract bad messages with education doesn’t work! Just ask Americans who are battling their own waistlines.
• It’s time for a massive revamp of school lunch programs, which should provide salad bars not cheeseburgers and fries. And let’s pull vending machines that sell candy and sodas out of our public schools. There is NO excuse for selling junk to our children.
• It’s time for policy makers to come clean about meat and milk consumption. Evidence is building that there is far too much animal protein in our diets. Check out The China Study by Cornell nutrition expert Thomas M. Campbell, who argues that animal protein is at the root of a huge range of health and weight problems. (More on this to come in a later post.)
• The federal government should launch a massive public affairs campaign to change American eating habits. For those who claim that’s not the government’s job, HAH! The American government spends billions to fight AIDS, which kills a tiny fraction of the population compared with those who die each year because of obesity, cancer, diabetes and heart disease. And the U.S. government has spent billions on public health campaigns to defeat other scourges such as smoking, venereal disease, polio and tuberculosis.
• And it’s time for the health-care industry to focus on prevention via nutrition rather than surgery and drugs to fix this crisis. When I started losing my own war against the bulge, my insurance offered hilariously misinformed and misleading classes on how to control my weight and reduce cholesterol. Fortunately, I embarked on a four-year mission to better understand what was wrong with my diet and how to fix it.

Still, I’m sure more qualified experts can come up with hundreds of ideas I never thought of, but the point is we need them now. We know what the problem is; it’s time for solutions.

Comments

[Susan R]

Of course obesity has become one of the world fastest growing health problems.