Tuesday, 17 November 2015
The Soda Tax Wars: Let's Help San Francisco and Berkeley Crush Big Soda | Jeff Ritterman, MD
The Soda Tax Wars: Let's Help San Francisco and Berkeley Crush Big Soda | Jeff Ritterman, MD
Tobacco Taxes have taken on smoking in Canada . Successfully ! Paul Murphy
Tobacco Taxes have taken on smoking in Canada . Successfully ! Paul Murphy
Monday, 16 November 2015
San Francisco Students Battle Campus Sugary Drink Contract - ABC News
San Francisco Students Battle Campus Sugary Drink Contract - ABC News
Who are the forces that are promoting Physical Activity and Isolating the Individual ? At some point an intersection between the Food Environment and Big Food will take place. Big Food has an Obesity problem. Paul Murphy
Who are the forces that are promoting Physical Activity and Isolating the Individual ? At some point an intersection between the Food Environment and Big Food will take place. Big Food has an Obesity problem. Paul Murphy
Sunday, 15 November 2015
Obesity Rises despite All Efforts to Fight It, U.S. Health Officials Say
Obesity
Rises despite All Efforts to Fight It, U.S. Health Officials Say
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
November 12, 2015
WASHINGTON
— Despite years of efforts to reduce obesity in America, including a major push
by Michelle Obama, federal health officials reported Thursday that the share of
Americans who were obese had not declined in recent years, and had edged up
slightly.
About 38
percent of American adults were obese in 2013 and 2014, up from 35 percent in
2011 and 2012. Researchers said the increase was small enough that it was not
statistically significant. But to many in public health, it was surprising and
disheartening.
“The
trend is very unfortunate and very disappointing,” said Marion Nestle, a
professor in the department of nutrition, food studies and public health at New
York University. “Everybody was hoping that with the decline in sugar and soda
consumption, that we’d start seeing a leveling off of adult obesity.”
And
compared with a decade ago, the increase was significant: In 2003 and 2004,
about 32 percent of adults were obese, said the report’s lead author, Cynthia L.
Ogden.
About 38
percent of American adults were obese in 2013 and 2014, researchers said, up
from 35 percent in 2011 and 2012.
Ruth
Fremson / The New York Times
Health
experts had hoped that gradual improvements
in the American diet in recent years might have moved the needle on obesity.
Consumption of full-calorie soda has dropped by a quarter since the late 1990s,
and there
is evidence that calorie intake has dropped for adults and children.
Obesity began rising in the 1980s, but the rate flattened in the 2000s, and declines among
young children in some cities had lifted expectations that the epidemic might
be easing.
Obesity
among young people was unchanged in 2013 and 2014 from the previous period, the
report found. Seventeen percent of Americans ages 2 to 19 were obese, the same
as in 2003 and 2004. Experts pointed out that far more work had been done to
fight obesity in children, including changes in school lunches and the removal
of sugar-sweetened beverages from some school systems.
Noting
that obesity rates did not rise for youth, Ms. Obama’s office said the focus of
the first lady’s efforts has been childhood obesity. Federal figures from last
year even showed a decline among the youngest children,
said Debra Eschmeyer, executive director of Let’s Move, Ms. Obama’s anti-obesity
campaign. “It is more than encouraging to see in today’s C.D.C. report that
childhood obesity rates are no longer rising,” she said.
The
figures are from the National Health and Nutrition
Examination Survey, the gold standard for federal health data,
released every two years. For smaller slices of the American population — for
example, women or blacks — researchers used four years of data, from 2011
through 2014, for the most reliable results.
Some of
the most striking numbers were among minorities. About 57 percent of black
women were obese from 2011 to 2014, the highest rate of any demographic. Next
highest were Hispanic women, at 46 percent, and Hispanic men, at 39 percent.
About 36 percent of white women were obese, and 34 percent of white men. The
prevalence of obesity was lowest among Asians, who had a combined rate of about
12 percent.
Dr.
Walter Willett, the chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School
of Public Health, cautioned that the modest improvements nationwide were
extremely unevenly spread, with most of them happening among more educated
Americans. A paper he helped write, published this month
in Health Affairs, found that Americans’ diets had improved in quality from
1999 to 2012 — with a reduction in trans fats, small increases in fiber and
less soda consumption — but that most of those advances were not happening
among lower-income, less educated Americans.
“In
general, there’s been a big gap” between rich and poor, Dr. Willett said. “When
we take the U.S. average, we are hiding a lot of detail.”
There
were a few other surprises. Men had more or less caught up to women in obesity
prevalence in recent years, but the new numbers showed that women had edged
ahead again, Dr. Ogden said. About 38 percent of adult women were obese from
2011 to 2014, the report found, compared with 34 percent of men.
Middle-aged
Americans were hardest hit. Adults ages 40 to 59 had the highest rate of
obesity, 40 percent, followed by people 60 and over, 37 percent of whom were
obese. About 32 percent of 20- to 39-year-olds were obese.
Kelly D.
Brownell, the dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University,
said the new figures were a reminder that many risks, such as the prevalence
and inexpensiveness of junk food, had not gone away, and a sign that policy
makers needed to redouble their efforts to, for example, impose a tax on soda.
“The
emergency flag has gone up,” he said. “We are not doing nearly enough.”
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/health/obesity-rises-despite-all-efforts-to-fight-it-us-health-officials-say.html?_r=0
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