Tackle obesity like smoking: researcher

GENEVA (Reuters) -
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 restrict how companies
market "junk" food to children and requirements for schools to
serve healthy meals, said Professor Boyd Swinburn, a public
health researcher who works 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."

Action is urgent because, aside from sub-Saharan Africa,
nearly every country has suffered a dramatic rise in the number
of obese people in the past 30 years. That increase has likely
been a tripling in many industrialized nations, he said.

The World Health Organisation classifies around 400 million
people around the world as obese, 20 million of them children
under the age of five.

Obesity raises the risk of diseases such as type 2 diabetes
and heart problems, and is a problem that is piling pressure on
already overburdened national health systems.

Swinburn says the food industry has largely driven the
epidemic with a stream of processed products that are cheaper
and better-tasting but filled with unhealthy ingredients.

Lack of physical fitness and exercise, while important,
have played only a small role in explaining why the number of
obese people has soared in recent decades, he said.

"Commercial drivers around food have been the biggest
influence over the past 30 years," he said. "The product, the
price, the promotion and the placement has changed
dramatically.

Swinburn urged governments to introduce policies similar to
those taken against smoking. These have included tightly
controlled marketing to children and regulations warning of the
dangers of smoking on cigarette packages.

Obesity is persistent despite people being increasingly
aware of the risks of being overweight, demonstrating the
problem requires direct government intervention, he said.

"Governments have a number of ways to influence the
behaviors of a population," Swinburn said.

Among anti-obesity measures taken, New York has banned
artery-clogging trans-fats from city restaurants and is forcing
fast-food chains to display calorie counts on their menu
boards.

Britain plans to spend 75 million pounds ($145 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.

(Reporting by Michael Kahn, Editing by Robert Woodward)