No is the answer to the question that is the title of this post.
Here’s why.
There was an article in the Saturday paper by Kim Severson called “Told to Eat Its Vegetables, America Orders Fries” and none of it surprised me because I think kids are not the right thing to target in the war on obesity which is really a war on type 2 diabetes which is what leads to heart disease, stroke and lots of other things.
The good news is that it’s not that hard to get rid of type 2 diabetes (which by itself costs $14,000 per person per year to treat, and 1 in 4 Americans has it or has the genetic marker to get it) and all of the downstream diseases. Typically if a person loses just 6% of their body weight, it all goes away. That’s not an incredible amount.
The bad news is that people aren’t losing the weight and the problem is getting a lot worse, faster, and it is now especially bad in kids.
I have lots of suggestions on how to move the needle on this, and I was lucky enough to spend some time last month with the US Surgeon General Regina Benjamin talking about it. She’s great, by the way.
But before I start into the suggestions, I want to first look in the rearview mirror to investigate a “war” that we seem to have largely won, and that’s the war on cancer. My question is why we have been more successful at getting people to quit something that is literally, clinically, addictive in smoking, and we are losing ground on things that are easier, or cheaper, or just taste better? Or is it really just an education issue? Or is it really a business issue? This is a big topic and I am not going to tackle all of it today, but here are some thoughts:
1) People were told that if they smoke they will get cancer, which most people equate with death. And a lot of people know someone who got lung cancer and died, my maternal grandfather in my case. I read the obituaries in the paper every day and not once have I ever seen the cause of death listed as obesity. I wondered about the old fashioned cause of death “consumption” but it turns out that’s another term for tuberculosis, not consuming too much food. I would assert that people don’t know being fat can kill them just as smoking can. They know heart disease will kill them but I don’t think people know the direct link is there between diabetes and heart disease. So RECOMMENDATION #1 is to turn the dial on the messaging and let people know that donuts and pizza and candy bars and burgers aren’t so different from cigarettes, they are just harder to light (I imagine). People aren’t scared enough about obesity.
2) People are hearing a lot about the obesity issue but it’s very rare that I hear anyone talking about the solution. My friend Jenn Ty tells me that Robb Wolf’s new book The Paleo Solution offers great guidance, but I think we need the Surgeon General to do public service announcements with facts like the 6% number I mentioned above. I am pretty sure the old messages from former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop had an impact. So RECOMMENDATION #2 get out some simple messaging from the Surgeon General and others. One company that is well suited to get behind this is the bank ING, their current ad campaign recommends that people know what their “number” is in terms of how much money they would need to retire. Extend that to knowing what your “number”is for your target weight (current weight minus the six percent).
3) The other end of this is the business end. At $14,000 a person per year, either you or your company or an insurance company is paying for that. I wrote before about how Safeway had no choice but to push on a corporate wellness program because their health care costs are growing way faster than their profits and they need to turn that tide. The evidence is there that the 6% number is real and companies need to do more, and some of it is experimentation with different programs and messages, because corporate culture will play a role. Different messages, different programs, different incentives, people need to move on this now. So that’s RECOMMENDATION #3 on rethinking all of this – corporate America and the insurance folks need to do more experimentation to drive these costs down.
4) A lot of people talk about childhood diabetes. Yes it is a problem, but until you get the parents educated and aware, and on board, focusing on the kids will be a waste of time and money as Severson’s article points out. That’s no surprise to me. Start with the parents and it will trickle down to the kids. RECOMMENDATION #4, focus on the parents first, and the childhood obesity piece will follow, not the other way around.
If we don’t slow the growth of diabetes, people will end up in the hospital, and we know that whole system is already a mess, so we need to stop this upstream of the people going to the hospital.
I would love to hear your feedback.
-Ric
Ric, good article. Diabetes is not typically attributed as the cause of death despite the fact that it is the leading cause of death in the U.S. when the complications are counted. People die from heart attacks and strokes as a result of their diabetes. Diabetes is often reffered to as the “silent killer” for this reason. We need to put more pressure on the media and food industry to get the the message out that Type 2 diabetes is a serious and deadly disease that can in many cases be prevented by modest weight loss as you point out in your blog.