Sometimes it feels as if you can’t turn around without bumping into another study that tells you how wonderful exercise is. Most of it is stuff you probably already know – at least it is if you read Health and Simple regularly – but once in a while you come across some fun new benefit that makes you think “cool”.

We’ll get to that in a minute.

But first.. Just Being Fat Increases a Kids Risk of Heart Disease
Now, we all know that more and more children are becoming overweight or even obese. Not just here in the U.S. but throughout Europe and other developed and affluent nations. Now a new study says the consequences of that may be far graver than we thought.

The study, in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, found that as early as age 7, being obese may raise a child’s risk of future heart disease and stroke, even if they don’t have any other risk factors for cardiovascular problems such as high blood pressure.

That’s a wake-up call to parents, schools and pediatricians that they need to be more aggressive in working with kids with weight problems, to tackle them early and often so that those kids don’t grow up overweight or obese. The longer the problems persist, the greater the risk of future health problems.

Now, the news that fat kids start showing signs of heart disease early on is not new. But this adds an extra wrinkle. This shows that even if the kids are otherwise healthy and show no other indications of heart problems, just being fat shows they are heading for a world of health problems, unless we act quickly.

Move More Live Longer, and Healthier
OK, stop me if you heard this before. Exercise or physical activity is linked to a friggin’ host of wonderful things such as reduced risk of:

• arthritis
• falls
• fractures
• heart disease
• lung disease
• cancer
• diabetes
• obesity
• watching the Kardashians (OK, the evidence isn’t all in on this one but hopefully if you workout regularly you won’t have time to watch this dreadful, awful, scripted “reality” show) (note from Shirl:  I kinda like it…love the make-up!)

But now a bunch of new studies in the Archives of Internal Medicine show that exercise can have benefits in all sorts of fun, new ways

• Among women who are 70 or older, those who exercise regularly during middle age are healthier in many areas of health from less risk of chronic disease to lower risk of heart problems or dementia
• Exercise programs are associated with denser bones in older women. Why is that good? Because stronger bones mean less likely of fracture or other serious problems if you fall – either fall in love or fall in the shower
• Here’s my favorite. Resistance training can improve some cognitive skills in older women. This is such a cool study. The researchers found that doing resistance training just once or twice a week can not only improve attention and concentration skills among older women, but it can also improve conflict resolution skills. Amazing eh. Better conflict resolution skills. But then I figured that no one wants to argue with an old woman who’s built like Arnold Schwarzenneger so maybe that explains it. But what a cool granny eh!

You may have heard a fanfare of trumpets the other day when it was announced that obesity levels in the US have flattened. Not fattened. Flattened. That doesn’t mean obesity levels are going down, only that they are no longer going up. Two thirds of American adults and one third of American kids are still either overweight or obese but the fact that those numbers are holding steady is being seen in some quarters as a reason to celebrate. Celebrate! As John McEnroe would say “You cannot be serious!”

And if they are serious then perhaps a new study will make them think twice because it gives an even more bizarre twist to this whole story. The study says eight in ten people in this country say they are in control of their eating and have a healthy relationship with food.

What planet are we on folks? Millions of Americans are overweight or obese or even morbidly obese (and let’s face it, anytime you have to put an adjective in front of the word obese because by itself it doesn’t describe how fat you are, then you know you are trouble) and yet somehow  80% of people say they have a healthy relationship with food! Sure, just as millions of people have a healthy relationship with their spouse right up to the moment they divorce them.

But there’s a wrinkle to this. This latest study was done by the lovely people at GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare.  Anytime the makers of a weight-loss product (GlaxoSmithKline)  puts out a survey about people being overweight I am suspicious, might I even say a tad skeptical! But this was such an interesting piece of work I took a second look. The GlaxoSmithKline people did a telephone survey of more than 2,000 people over the age of 18. They found that:

• 79% of people say they are “satisfied with the state of their personal eating habits”
• But 67% admit to having poor eating habits at least every week, sometimes more often
• 73% said while they are happy with their eating habits they think most other Americans have bad eating habits.

So either the telephone surveyors phoned just people who were skinny..or they found many people who are in denial!  Either way it makes no sense!

Essentially people are saying “OK, I over eat once in a while, once a week perhaps, maybe more often, ok, maybe once a day; but I’m fine it’s everyone else you have to worry about.”

There is a real disconnect here. Part of the problem may be that when we look around and if everyone looks like us we assume that we are normal. But if everyone around us is fat, and we look like them, that does not mean we are normal. It means we are fat. We have lost sight of what is normal, we have lost sight of what is healthy.

Maybe that’s the real reason why the obesity rate is stuck at “Gross”. We think it’s normal.

Oh, and the people at GlaxoSmithKline would be quite happy if you would like to buy their weight loss drug too.

The title to this piece is the opening line to a song by Simon and Garfunkel. Strangely the song is called the 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy) – and that alone dates it – even though there is no obvious reference to either 59th Street or a bridge.  The line sprang to mind when I read a new study that pointed out the faster you eat the more likely you are to overeat.

The study is in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, and it says that eating a meal quickly, as opposed to slowly,  limits the release of hormones in the stomach that signal the brain you are full. Because your brain isn’t getting the message that the stomach has had enough it just allows you to carry on eating longer, consuming more food than you need.

Here’s the fun part – how they did it! The researchers gave the study participants bowls of ice cream (300ml to be precise) and got them to eat them at different rates on different days. One day they’d scarf them down. The next they’d take their time and savor each mouthful of delicious, full-fat ice cream.

Before and after each bowl the researchers took blood samples from the participants and measured them for glucose, insulin, plasma lipids and gut hormones. They found that those who took 30 minutes to eat the ice cream had higher concentrations of the hormones that signal the brain “I’m done, stop eating now”, compared to people who wolfed the stuff down in half the time.

The researchers say this could help explain why many people are overweight. They are so busy and eat in such a hurry that they are not paying attention to what they eat or how they eat it. That means they’re more likely to eat crappy food, and more likely to wolf it down fast because they are in a hurry and therefore more likely to eat more of it than they need.

It’s a triple whammy.

So next time you are sitting down to eat, spend a few minutes ahead of time thinking about what you are going to eat, and try to spend a little time during the meal focusing on how fast you are eating it. Savor the taste and smell. Don’t just shovel it in. You might find that not only do you eat less, you also enjoy it more.

To paraphrase Simon and Garfunkel; slow down, you masticate too fast, you’ve got to make that meal last.

Docs Diss Obese Patients

As if being overweight or obese isn’t hard enough (think of all the extra diseases it puts you at risk of from heart disease and diabetes to cancer) now comes a new study saying that the people we rely on to help us lose that weight, are more likely to disrespect us because of our weight.

The study, in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, says that obese patients get less respect from physicians than normal-weight patients. In fact the researchers, who surveyed 40 doctors and 238 patients in the Baltimore area, found that the physicians had little respect for around 40 percent of their patients and said that the patients body mass index was “significantly and negatively associated” with respect.

In other words, the fatter the patient the more likely the doctor was to have lower respect for them. Nice eh!

The biggest problem with this is not just that the docs were being hideously insensitive, it’s that many of the patients picked up on the disrespect and said that made them less likely to consult the doctor, and not just about their weight but about other important health issues too such as pap smears, mammograms or other screenings. And that put them at even greater risk of yet more health problems.

The researchers say this is a strong signal that doctors really need to be aware of how they behave in front of patients, and to keep their own personal feelings in check. Because what starts out as a dollop of disrespect from the doc could end up in a deadly disease in a patient who decided not to get help because they hated the way they were treated.

Do Your Kidneys a Favor – Skip the Salt and Soda

Millions of Americans drink a couple of sodas a day and liberally sprinkle their food with salt. It’s a pretty nasty combination as far as the health of your kidneys is concerned, and two new studies reinforce that.

The studies were presented at a meeting of the American Society of Nephrology’s annual meeting in San Diego.

One of them followed 3,000 women enrolled in the Nurses’ Health Study over 11 years and found that the higher the salt intake over time the lower the kidney function. The second study looked at the same group of women but instead focused on soda intake. They found pretty much the same. The more soft drinks and sodas the woman drank the higher the likelihood of impaired kidney function.

Now kidneys are not something you want to mess around with. They help clean out all sorts of nasty stuff from your blood and help regulate your blood pressure and other assorted vital functions. In short, without them you’d be in deep trouble.

So next time you are staring at a vending machine wondering what deliciously salty snack you’ll buy and which fabulously sugary beverage you’ll wash it down with, think again. Get a bottle of water and an apple. Your kidneys will thank you for it.

Here’s some cheery news. Not surprising, but not much fun either. Being overweight puts you at greatly increased risk of cancer. And of course death.

This latest piece of good cheer about weight comes from a study released at ECCO 15 – ESMO 34 (sounds like a football score doesn’t it!), the largest cancer congress meeting in Europe. The researchers found that at least 124,000 new cases of cancer in 2008 were caused by excess body weight.

Now, the study was only done in Europe but I’m guessing that the same findings would apply to Americans because,  despite some language differences we really are pretty much the same as Europeans. Except for the French of course, but let’s not go there.

Anyway, the researchers did a lot of number crunching and found that 3.2 percent of new cancers in European men could be attributed to being overweight or obese, in women the number was much higher, 8.6 percent. Why were the numbers so much higher for women? Well, the researchers aren’t really sure but have some theories, most of them related to the number of women who used to take Hormone Replacement Therapy.

The bottom line, however, is that Dr. Andrew Renehan, the lead author of the study, says unless we make sizable changes “it is possible that obesity may become the biggest attributable cause of cancer in women within the next decade.” Yikes!!!

Exercise – It’s All In The Genes

Do you ever see those folks who workout regularly turning up their nose at people who struggle to get to the gym more than once or twice a week? Well, next time they do that throw this in their face. Exercise has nothing to do with will power or self-discipline, and everything to do with genetics.

Ha, take that! Well, almost. There’s a growing body of research that suggests that people who are fitness fanatics may be genetically primed to be that way, while those who are couch potatoes have no such advantage.

One of those studies was done in Sweden in 2006. They compared 5,334 identical twins and their workout habits to those of 8,028 fraternal twins. Why is that important, well, identical twins have as you might imagine almost identical genetic makeup; while fraternal twins share only about half their genetic makeup. The researchers found that, on average, identical twins were twice as likely to share the same workout habits and tendencies as fraternal twins – suggesting a strong genetic component to one’s willingness or enthusiasm for exercise.

But of course that doesn’t mean that if you don’t have the genetic predisposition for physical activity that you can not develop those same habits. You can. It just takes a bit more effort. And the first part of that effort is shifting your butt off that couch.

Keep That Spider Away From My…….

Amid the headlines today on a vaccine showing promise against HIV, and new treatments for pancreatic cancer, this one caught my eye. Spider Venom for Erectile Dysfunction. See, it got your attention too didn’t it!

It’s based on a study presented at the American Heart Association’s conference on High Blood Pressure Research in Chicago. Apparently the researchers found that the wonderfully named Brazilian Wandering spider’s bite can cause a lot of pain and a very prolonged erection.  So now they are looking at it as a possible treatment for erectile problems.

Now, call me cowardly, but anytime anyone comes near my privates with a deadly spider, I’m heading in the other direction as fast as I can. I don’t care what the possible benefits are.

The only upside is that at least the TV ads would be much better than those showing men and women in bath tubs gazing out to sea. It’s Arachnophobia meets Viagra.

http://www.ecco-org.eu/News/News/In-the-news/page.aspx/72?xf_itemId=614&xf_catId=8

Sugar is probably one of the most popular ingredients in cooking. It makes everything, well almost everything, taste better. No wonder it’s in virtually everything we eat, even in foods we wouldn’t ordinarily think contained any – such as a Big Mac, ketchup, even peanut butter.

The average American eats 156 lbs of sugar every year, according to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. Think about that. 156 lbs, that’s 31 5lb bags of sugar. It’s no wonder obesity is such a big problem in this country. Back in 1890 we only consumed 5lbs per person per year. Nowadays we get through that in about 2 weeks.

But obesity is not the only problem caused by consuming too much sugar. In her book, Lick The Sugar Habit, Nancy Appleton Ph.D. lists 76 ways that sugar is bad for you. Obesity is only #13 on that list. Here’s the first ten.

1. Sugar can suppress your immune system and impair your defenses against infectious disease.
2. Sugar upsets the mineral relationships in your body: causes chromium and copper deficiencies and interferes with absorption of calcium and magnesium.
3. Sugar can cause can cause a rapid rise of adrenaline, hyperactivity, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, and crankiness in children.
4. Sugar can produce a significant rise in total cholesterol, triglycerides and bad cholesterol and a decrease in good cholesterol.
5. Sugar causes a loss of tissue elasticity and function.
6. Sugar feeds cancer cells and has been connected with the development of cancer of the breast, ovaries, prostate, rectum, pancreas, biliary tract, lung, gallbladder and stomach.
7. Sugar can increase fasting levels of glucose and can cause reactive hypoglycemia.
8. Sugar can weaken eyesight.
9. Sugar can cause many problems with the gastrointestinal tract including: an acidic digestive tract, indigestion, malabsorption in patients with functional bowel disease, increased risk of Crohn’s disease, and ulcerative colitis.
10. Sugar can cause premature aging.

Even without the other 66 reasons it’s a pretty scary and depressing list, one that could frighten even the sweetest tooth into cutting back (which is a good idea because #76 is that it causes gum disease)

Manufacturers not only pack foods with sugar, they also try and disguise the fact  by giving them different names from dextrose and sucrose to fructose, diatose and molasses (if you want to see the dozens of other ‘names’ check this out) Whatever the name, the end result is the same, extra calories in your diet, extra problems for your body to have to deal with.

Let’s just take one part in particular, the liver. When you eat whole foods, even fruits rich in sugar, the fibre and other elements in the food allow the liver to absorb the sugar at a comfortable rate.

However, if you just consume sugar without the fiber that slows down its absorption then you flood the liver with it. Over time that can damage the liver, causing liver cells to divide and the organ to expand. If you do that to excess you can destroy your liver.

And you don’t even have to do that for too many years to see the impact. In just the past couple of years two 15 year old boys underwent liver transplants at the University of California San Francisco after basically destroying their livers by drinking a dozen or so sodas a day. 15 years old. And they had no other underlying risk factors, no family history. Just a sugar habit.

So next time you are staring at the vending machine wondering what soda to buy, think about those 15 year old kids, think about their liver, think about your own liver, think about those 76 reasons why sugar is bad for you.

Think about it. Doesn’t taste quite so good now does it?

I used to think that being healthy, losing weight, sticking with an exercise program was just a matter of will power. If you were fat or slovenly or had bad habits it was just because you lacked the fortitude to change your lifestyle and take care of yourself.

Then I grew up and discovered that the world is really a lot more complicated than I realized. You may have good intentions but if you don’t have the environment to help you act on those intentions, it can be very difficult to lead a healthy life, or make healthy changes.

I was reminded of that quite powerfully the other day when I came across a study that showed that even small differences in environment can have a big impact.

Researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research found that pregnant women who lived in areas that had a lot of fast food restaurants gained unhealthy amounts of weight during their pregnancy, compared to pregnant women who didn’t have fast food restaurants near them.

The distance from their home to the fast food joints didn’t have to be far either. It could be as little as one mile, just outside what most people – particularly pregnant women – would feel like walking.

That’s what public health experts call a “toxic environment”, when the world around you makes it difficult to lead a healthy life.

That toxic environment could be living in a neighborhood that lacks good grocery stores where you can readily buy fresh fruits and vegetables at affordable prices.

It could be living in a community where the streets are too busy for children to be able to play out, and where there are few other facilities such as parks or community centers where they can go to play and feel safe.

It can be living in a community that is sandwiched between several major freeways and an industrial area so that the air quality is always questionable.

All those can make it difficult for people to make the kinds of changes they need to do to lead healthier lives. The last one makes it hard even for people who make changes to lead a healthier life, because the air they breathe is so bad.

That has a number of serious health implications.

First, it means that more people are likely to be overweight or even obese, putting themselves at greater risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

Second it means that their immune systems are also more likely to be weak, making them more vulnerable to infections or viruses such as the recent swine flu virus. And if they are more likely to catch those viruses the odds are pretty high that they are also more likely to spread them to their family, friends and colleagues at work.

So, even if you are taking good care of yourself and doing all the right things, simply by coming in close contact with people who live in “toxic environments” your health is at risk.

This is something that affects us all. This is something we all have an interest in. That’s the good news, because it’s going to take all of us to make the kinds of societal changes we need to make to change things.

We need more open spaces for children to play in and for adults to be active in.

We need more grocery stores in poor and low-income neighborhoods so that people in those communities have access to fresh fruits and vegetables at affordable prices – and so they don’t have to take three buses across town to bring them home.

We need schools and community centers to open their doors to the people in the neighborhood in the evenings and at the weekend – so they can have somewhere to be active (especially in winter) and take classes, or just create a greater sense of community.

In a sense, until we make these kinds of improvements we are all living in a ‘toxic environment’.

Next time you are at the park or the beach or just walking around your local shopping mall take a look around you at the kids. What do you see? I’m guessing that you’ll see a huge number of kids who are either overweight or downright obese. In some places it may be much harder to find a kid who is normal weight than it is to find a chunky child.

All that struck me as Shirley and I were in Hawaii on our recent vacation, not because the kids we saw were fat, but because so many of the ones we saw weren’t. It got me to wondering why, and if the answer to that couldn’t help kids nationwide.

One evening we were at a bar-b-q at the beach with some local families and it was fascinating to see their kids, mostly boys, just running around for hours, playing, fishing, swimming, and generally just goofing about.

It reminded me that that was how most people used to grow up. That for generations children were able to run around and play in their own neighborhoods. In some cases, in some places, kids can still do that but for most children today, living in the city or the suburbs, that’s just not possible. There’s too much traffic on the streets, too few parks or other safe places to play.

That lack of freedom to just run around is one of the reasons why so many children today are struggling with their weight (though obviously diet plays a big role too). It may also be one of the reasons why we have seen an increase in the number of kids diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder) in recent years.

Think about it. If children don’t have the opportunity to run around and burn off all their excess energy it gets channeled into other things, other ways. One of those may well be acting out, one of the critical factors in getting a child diagnosed as ADHD.

On Kauai the kids have plenty of room and even more opportunity to run around. They can play soccer, swim, surf, run, run, and run some more. In essence they were able to just be kids.

Clearly it’s not possible to replicate those conditions in cities and suburbs throughout the country but maybe there is something we can do to help increase the opportunities for children to get exercise, and along the way to help boost community spirits in economically depressing times.

In cities around the U.S. tens of thousands of homes are in foreclosure, in many cases they are derelict and ready to be pulled down. Instead of leaving those soon-to-be-empty plots to grow grass and get decrepit, why not turn them into play areas for children? After the houses are torn down and the lot is empty, the area could be turned into places where children can play and run and burn off steam and calories at the same time.

Clearly there isn’t much money around to do this but it wouldn’t take that much, and perhaps instead of relying on the city or county or state to provide the funding, the local community could do it themselves. People in the neighborhood could work together to provide the labor to dig up these abandoned pieces of land, to turn them into places that were big enough to allow kids to play.

They wouldn’t need to be fancy. They wouldn’t need to have equipment. They wouldn’t need to be pretty. They just need to be safe.

Right now there are a lot of people out of work, people who are struggling to find purpose in their daily activities. Helping out with a project like this could give them a sense of value, a sense they are contributing something to the community, while they look for work.

It could do something equally valuable too. It could give kids their childhood back.

So, the other day I was sitting around at lunch with some of my colleagues chatting about the resurgence of the Taliban in Pakistan, the Obama bailout plan, and the nutritional qualities of Funyun Rings,  and I noticed that not one of my workmates was drinking water. They were drinking sodas and ice teas and fruit juices and such like. But not one ordinary bottle or even cup of water.

Now, we live in San Francisco which has some of the cleanest, tastiest water in the U.S. Apparently they’ve done blind taste testing and found that it beats the pants off fancy, expensive bottled water. So there is no reason why my mates at work couldn’t quench their thirst with a refreshing beverage straight from the tap.

That thought was reinforced when I saw a new study that says when it comes to weight loss, what you drink may be more important than what you eat.

The study, in the April 1 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, said the calories you get from drinks are more influential in terms of how much weight you put on, and how much weight you shed, than the calories you get from solid food.

Now it’s not just any beverage you understand, it’s those deliciously tasty, sugar sweetened beverages. That means sodas, fruit drinks, fruit punches, or any drink where one of the main ingredients is sugar.

In fact, the researchers found that at 37 percent of calories, sugar sweetened beverages were the leading cause of liquid calories. For example, a 12 oz can of Coke has 155 calories, a 16oz can has 200 calories.

So that is the bad news. The good news is that just by cutting out these drinks, and substituting water, you can dramatically cut how many calories you take in every day. And cutting out those calories means weight lost.

Now cutting back on beer and wine and those calorie packed coffee-drinks at Starbucks can also help, but nowhere near as much as those sugar sweetened drinks.

As a society we’ve become so accustomed to meeting the demands of  our sweet tooth that we sometimes forget we have a choice. We instinctively reach for, ask for, order those sweet tasting drinks.

After all, you are having a salad for lunch so why not have a Pepsi or Coke. Or you  skipped breakfast so you need something to give you a little kick-start to the day. Or it’s 4pm and you had to skip lunch so you need something to give you a boost to get through to closing time.

But each can or bottle of those oh-so-sweet, deliciously refreshing drinks comes with a hefty price, and I’m not talking just dollars and cents here. There’s a calorie count too.

So, next time you are thinking about how you can lose a few pounds and are sitting down to lunch with some friends, take a look around you and notice what people are drinking.

Then take a look at what you are drinking.

Sometimes the answer is right in front of us. We just need to know how to tap iinto it.

Some friends of ours recently visited San Francisco from England. We had many conversations during their stay and asked them to write an article about some of their perceptions about America. Vicki Wiles is a nurse and genetic counselor, these are her thoughts.

“We love visiting America. We love the sunshine after England’s grey skies, the proper snow that doesn’t make all the transport grind to a halt and the warm friendly reception we get from you lot. Well ok, sometimes we find the constant “ Have a nice day’s” a bit overwhelming, being reserved English types who take a while to get to know anyone, but we appreciate the sentiment.

One thing we do find daunting though is the food. We (my husband and I ) first came over in 1981, traveling by Greyhound bus from New York to Chicago and then to New Orleans. And since then we’ve been back 6 or 7 times to the East and West coasts, leaving the bit in the middle yet to be explored.

In that time we’ve seen the food portions served in restaurants grow at an alarming rate. It starts as a joke. How many pancakes will there be on one plate and will they be covered in cream as well as syrup? Will the cooked breakfast for one have enough on it to feed a family of five?

But it stops being a joke when, yet again, I am unable to finish what I’ve been given and have to leave half or more of it untouched and having to be thrown away.

Anyone would get overweight if they finished these platefuls regularly, unless they dug holes in the road by hand all day for a living and didn’t eat again until evening.

It makes us wonder why so many of the restaurants and diners in the US have adopted this way of serving food. Is it something to do with the settler mentality that makes eating an enormous meal seem a good idea, just in case you don’t get anything much else for 3 days? No wonder obesity is an increasing problem.

We’ve found that sharing a meal works well. This makes it cheaper for us poor Brits now we get so few dollars to our pounds.

But now we’re back in England after our recent visit to Kevin and Shirley, we’ve realized that the same thing is happening here, because what happens in the US eventually crosses the Atlantic to reach us.

You’ve sent us good things like smoking bans in bars and public places and some excellent TV series but this trend is one we could do without if our increasing obesity rate is anything to go by.

Can’t we go back to smaller portions of good food with lots of fresh fruit and vegetables? Or are we just eating in the wrong restaurants?

A couple of weeks ago we ran a Special Report about a new approach to tackling the problem of obesity, one that targeted the fast food industry and used the same kind of public health strategies that are proving effective against tobacco and smoking, namely restricting where they can be consumed and by whom.

Now the food industry is once again coming in for a less than flattering comparison to tobacco from the world of public health. This time, two of the nation’s leading public health experts are calling on the food industry not to try the same stalling and counter strategies that the tobacco industry used for years to fight anti-smoking campaigns.

At issue are tactics that smear anyone critical of the industry, distorting science around the health and quality of fast food, and insisting that they are not encouraging children or anyone else to overuse their products.

The two health experts are Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, and Kenneth Warner, dean of the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

In an article in The Milbank Quarterly, the two say that the food industry is adopting similar tactics to those used by the tobacco industry to combat its critics.

In a news release Brownell says “One is heavy-duty lobbying; two is paying scientists to produce results that favor industry positions; three is fighting to frame the issue as a matter of personal rather than corporate responsibility, and the fourth is funding front groups to do their dirty work.”

The two issue a number of actions they say the food industry needs to take to show its sincerity in helping tackle the issue of obesity. They include:

• Stop selling unhealthy products in schools and hospitals
• Stop blaming people for their actions regarding obesity
• Stop using celebrities and slick ad campaigns to promote their products
• Stop marketing unhealthy foods to children
  

They also called on the food industry to reformulate their products with healthier ingredients.

Naturally the food industry is not taking kindly to the criticism, or the suggestions. It has long been their position that this is a matter of individual responsibility; that no one forces people to eat their products or to eat them in amounts that are bad for them.

However, given the billions of dollars spent every year in advertising and promotion, and the fact that in many poor and low income communities there are few if any stores that sell fresh produce, many people have few options.

Walk around any impoverished inner city neighborhood and count how many supermarkets there are, or even corner grocery stores that sell fresh fruits and vegetables. Then compare that to the number of liquor stores and fast food restaurants in the neighborhood. The latter vastly outnumber the former.

It’s difficult for a community to improve its health on either a collective or individual level when it lacks the resources to do so. Without easy access to healthy foods, without access to safe streets and parks where people can exercise and children play, it’s hard to turn the tide of obesity.

The food industry is right that individuals bear some responsibility for their health issues. But the industry also has some responsibility in pushing their products. They can’t simply load the gun then walk away and say it’s not their fault if the consumer pulls the trigger.

We’re all in this together, which is why Brownell and Warner’s call for action is so important. It moves the issue from some overweight Big Mac fans looking for someone to blame for their expanding waistline to serious, thoughtful public health experts looking for ways to resolve a national, indeed international, heath concern.

Until we, as a society, take responsibility for this problem nothing is going to change. The food industry may not like it, but they are part of the problem. The only question now is do they want to be part of the solution.