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Psychologist
addresses obesity crisis
(November
2004 Issue)
In the U.S. today, more than 15% of children under age 19 are considered
overweight or obese according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
It's shocking and it's sad that these children will probably deal
with weight and body image issues their entire lives, but it's not
altogether surprising. In fact, according to Kelly Brownell, Ph.D.,
chairperson of the Psychology Department of Yale University and
director of the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, the
current epidemic of childhood obesity could easily be predicted
just by looking at the way our society deals with food.
Brownell, who wrote a book on the subject, "Food Fight: The Inside
Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis and What We
Can Do About It" (McGraw-Hill, 2003), spoke with New England
Psychologist's Catherine Robertson Souter about what he calls
our "toxic" food environment and what can be done by all of us,
as individuals and as professionals, to make healthy changes.
Q: What is this toxic environment you talk about?
A: When one puts all the pieces together, you see that there
is a toxic situation that pretty much guarantees the population
will have an unhealthy diet.
By toxic I mean that in the presence of this environment, people
will get sick. There are five essential features of unhealthy food:
it is highly accessible, very convenient, engineered to taste good,
very heavily promoted and inexpensive. Now all those properties
should apply to healthy foods but they don't. That's why we have
a problem.
Q: So, the result is that people are overweight?
A: Right, in the presence of those conditions, it's not surprising
that people eat more calories and gain weight.
And, the physical activity environment has become a problem as
well. People use cars almost everywhere, physical education is being
subtracted from schools and other day-to-day physical activity has
been declining steadily for years.
As an example, there was a time when more than 70% of children
rode a bike or walked to schools. Now that number is below 15%.
Q: Part of that is that we are not building cities that are
accessible for walking.
A: That's exactly right. Many places where people live in modern
America do not have sidewalks, have busy streets that are unsafe
to cross and people have to go long distances to find services they
need like the food store, the cleaners, post office, etc.
Q: What is the solution?
A: There is no one action that will solve this problem. Which
by the way is used as justification by the food industry for doing
nothing - the soft drink industry says that removing soft drinks
from schools won't solve the obesity problem. Well, they are right,
nothing by itself will. But it's a start.
I believe the place to start is with children. Obesity is very
hard to treat when somebody has it. You can prevent a lifetime of
health problems by working with children. The first serious victory
will be in the schools because people are accustomed to think of
schools as a safe place for children and feel that if they are being
exploited for commercial purposes during school days, something
needs to be changed. In many places around the country, schools
are getting rid of soft drink and candy machines. In addition, there
is work to improve the environment in general, for example, by encouraging
parents to bring in fresh fruit or other healthy snacks for birthdays
rather than cupcakes. Then, of course the school lunch program can
do a great deal by offering good tasting, healthy food.
The second issue is to somehow control the amount of advertising
children are seeing for unhealthy foods. You can do it three ways,
you can legislate it, you can regulate it or you can litigate it.
The most desirable would be to have legislation because this would
mean that our elected representatives are working on behalf of their
constituents and taking action to protect children.
Q: Is there a group that is working on all this?
A: The group that's probably the most active is the Center for
Science in Public Interest in Washington. They have a wonderful
report on their Web site called Pestering Parents. They also have
a report called Liquid Candy, talking about soft drinks.
Q: How did you get involved in this issue yourself?
A: I got involved in obesity back in graduate school as a research
assistant. And it so happens that eating and weight are very interesting
issues in the world of health psychology because they bring together
culture, biology, psychology, big business and public policy. There
are a lot of interests wrapped into one.
Q: How has the book been received?
A: Quite positively. It's already being used by public policy
leaders in a number of places. There have been a number of Senate
staffers with whom I've spoken. The book has been used by members
of the World Health Organization in Geneva - they've doing a lot
of interesting things regarding obesity.
To me, that's the most gratifying part of writing a book, the fact
that it might have stimulated people to change.
And by the way, I really do feel that global changes come in that
specific way. People should never doubt their ability to make a
difference as an individual. It's much like the tobacco wars that
were begun by local action because the federal government was so
much influenced by the tobacco industry. Local things are happening
with nutrition that are starting to become contagious in a positive
way.
Q: What can psychologists do on an individual level?
A: There is a lot of good nutrition information available for
psychologists to use with their clients. One good place is a government
Web site, nutrition.gov.
Psychologists can also be very active at a local level as parents
and as activists - working with schools to create a good food environment.
Then of course, people can be powerful advocates as consumers by
writing letters to the food industry encouraging the food industry
to abandon the advertising of unhealthy food to children. And contact
children's media companies like Disney and Nickleodeon to ask them
to stop licensing the characters for advertising unhealthy foods.
Q: What does the future hold?
A: I think that we have reason to be hopeful because the population
is becoming increasingly sensitive to these issues. Legislators
are beginning to take action and school systems are making changes
and even world governments are beginning to address these issues.
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