Obesity is Rising and We're Still Not Making a Dent
The news is startling but unsurprising. According to a new World Health Organization (WHO) report, one in three low and middle-income countries now faces the two extremes of malnutrition – undernutrition and obesity.
The report, published yesterday in the Lancet, suggests that almost 2.3 billion children and adults worldwide are overweight or obese, and more than 150 million children are not growing properly due to malnutrition, warning that undernutrition and obesity's effects can last for generations.
This “new nutrition reality,” said the study’s lead author Dr. Francesco Branca, Director of the Department of Nutrition for Health and Development at the WHO, heralds a whole new classification system. “No longer can characterize countries as low-income and undernourished, or high-income and only concerned with obesity,” he said.
Dr. Branca said that both forms of malnutrition share a common denominator – food systems that fail to provide all people with healthy, safe, affordable, and sustainable diets. As I write in my forthcoming book, the obesity and overweight epidemic can be traced, in large part, to the collapse of systems that support human health and indirectly affect our weight.
There are have numerous suggestions on how we might change this paradigm, including global action across food systems – “from production and processing, through trade and distribution, pricing, marketing, and labeling, to consumption and waste. All relevant policies and investments must be radically re-examined,” says Dr. Branca.
All of this sounds nice, of course, but what are the chances of broad, sweeping changes to global systems? In this country, we can’t even get a consensus of experts to agree on the best diet for weight loss, much less come up with a universal policy for reforming our broken food system.
Another problem and one which Forbes columnist and physician, Dr. Bruce Y Lee, has written about extensively is the nature of a chronic disease like obesity. “Obesity is a global catastrophe in slow motion that moves fast enough to cause havoc but not rapidly enough for people to recognize what’s happening,” Dr. Lee writes. The challenge of a disease like obesity, adds Dr. Lee, is that it’s not an apparent killer like a hungry great white shark or charging Bengal tiger. Instead, he writes, obesity is more “devious, insidious and thus in many ways more dangerous.”
We, humans, are, by our very nature, reactive, not proactive. How many of us check under our car’s hood if the engine is running fine? We don’t react until the wheels fall off the wagon, and by then it’s often too late to avert disaster. How can we expect people to pay attention to obesity, or even think of it as an epidemic given you reactive nature, especially when it concerns our health? If proposed cuts to organizations that support obesity research such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the CDC, and the United States Department of Agriculture are any indication, then we already have the answer. The majority of us choose to remain blissfully unaware.
At risk of casting a pall over the recommendations in the WHO report, I’m not holding my breath for concerted, global action against the obesity catastrophe. There are too many competing interests, many of which have no interest in doing what’s in our best interests if it cuts into the bottom line.
The other issue is that we don’t have anywhere near a global consensus when it comes to dealing with the obesity epidemic. Ask ten people, and you’ll get 15 responses. We can’t even decide on the ideal diet, and even if we could, it would only make a dent in the problem. Never forget that obesity is a systemic, multifactorial problem requiring a multifactorial solution. There are no Band-aid fixes.
How do we know this? Does anyone sincerely believe that 2.3 billion people are just lazy, lack willpower, and make awful food decisions? Numbers like those we’re seeing today tell me something else is amiss. Our world is broken. From a polluted environment to a non-stop onslaught of food advertising, the systems that support our wellbeing are damaged, some beyond repair. And there’s no organized group or coalition of countries really doing anything to help us shift course.
Sure, there are a handful of people calling for more action, but they are few and far between. I hate to say it, but we still haven’t hit rock bottom of the obesity epidemic, and that may be what it takes for people, especially our elected leaders, to turn around and say, “what have we done?”
Whatever the answer, we can’t wait forever for change. Time is running out.
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