'Tobacco approach' for obesity
2008-05-15 08:07
Geneva - Tackling the global obesity
epidemic will require governments to take similar action to that
many used to curb smoking, a top researcher said on Wednesday.
This could include regulations that restricted how companies
market "junk" food to children and requirements for schools to
serve healthy meals, said Professor Boyd Swinburn, a public
health researcher who worked with the World Health Organisation.
"The brakes on the obesity epidemic need to be policy-led
and governments need to take centre stage," Swinburn, a
researcher at Deakin University in Australia, told Reuters at
the 2008 European Congress on Obesity.
"Governments have to lead the way they did with the tobacco
epidemic. We need hard-hitting messages."
The World Health Organisation classified around 400 million
people around the world as obese, 20 million of them children
under the age of five.
Obesity raised the risk of diseases such as type 2 diabetes
and heart problems, and was a problem that was piling pressure on
already overburdened national health systems.
Obesity was persistent despite people being increasingly
aware of the risks of being overweight, demonstrating the
problem required direct government intervention, he said.
Among anti-obesity measures taken, New York banned
artery-clogging trans-fats from city restaurants and was forcing
fast-food chains to display calorie counts on their menu boards.
Britain plans to spend £75 million on a
campaign encouraging healthy lifestyles as part of a wider
anti-obesity strategy including compulsory cooking lessons for
children and the promotion of exercise.