WIN Wyoming and WIN the Rockies

Thought Bullets
for
July 2002

Fixing a Fat Nation

Fred Vanden Heede, grant writer and consultant, forwarded an article to the WIN the Rockies office from The Washington Monthly entitled "Fixing a Fat Nation - Why diets and gyms won’t save us from the obesity epidemic." The article was written by Tom Farley, a professor at Tulane University of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and Deborah Cohen, a senior natural scientist at the RAND Corporation.

The thought bullets for this month come from a few of the insights from the article. Please visit the website for The Washington Monthly and read the entire article:
        http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0112.farley.cohen.html

• In today’s environment, it is nearly impossible for most people to stay thin. Desk jobs, television, the Internet, and housing developments conspire against physical activity, and the environment is laden with junk foods.
• It doesn’t take much calorie imbalance to make people obese - just consistency.
• The call to "eat less, exercise more" has failed. For many (most?) people, willpower is not enough to battle an environment that promotes overeating and inactivity. We don’t need another diet. We need a way to make healthy eating and daily physical activity unavoidable.
• According to Advertising Age, McDonald’s spends over $1 billion a year on promotion, and Coke spends more than $800 million. In comparison, the national 5-A-Day fruit and vegetable campaign spends about $2 million a year.
• Smoking rates are going down and obesity rate are accelerating. Soon (and it may have happened already), obesity will become the number one killer in America.
• Effectively combating obesity will not require more drugs, diet books or workout videos. Success will depend on retooling our environment to get us moving and to put the junk foods farther out of reach and to make items like fruits, vegetables, whole grains and low-fat milk products easily accessible and affordable.
• Some people are more prone to become obese than others, but human genes do not trump basic metabolic laws. Weight is gained when calories eaten exceed calories burned. Our genetics are still programmed from our hunter-gatherer days when we had to store fat to survive the next famine.
• Americans know that being fat is bad. They’ve now been hearing the message for over half a century.

Source: Fixing a Fat Nation - Why diets and gyms won’t save us from the obesity epidemic. Tom Farley and Deborah Cohen, The Washington Monthly, December 2001.

Compiled by Betty Holmes, MS, RD