Good news on fighting the obesity epidemic....

Today's post: Thursday, 4-9-2009

There are several things that tend to make you fat or keep you that way. And, many of those same things also tend to cause type 2 diabetes and heart attacks and other cardiovascular diseases.

So, anytime I read something with important information on how to prevent this situation or help fix it, it really gets my attention.

For example, if you are sedentary and never active and never get any very vigorous exercise from competitive sports or strength training or interval cardio AND you eat lots of fast carbs (high glycemic foods) such as foods with high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and refined grains and very little fiber, you will get “insulin resistant” which means you get high levels of insulin in your blood that no longer lowers excess levels of blood sugar. And, if that becomes excessive or goes on too long, you get fat; you get high blood sugar to the point it begins destroying your capillaries and the parts of you that that depend on them; and your chance of getting a heart attack and becoming senile skyrocket.

Unfortunately, the number of people who are now seriously fat, what the medical profession calls obese, is going up dramatically world wide and even more dramatically here in the United States.

A recent news story reports that in the United States now one in five four year olds is fat.

And, those kids grow up to be fat kids and fat teens. That’s really bad news because an alarming number of those kids now have type 2 diabetes and even early heart disease.

That means huge increases in health care costs will soon come into a system that is almost collapsing from the increases in costs that have already happened.

And, it can be truly dreadful for the kids it happens to. A recent American Heart Association ad showed a picture the back of a woman at the beach. She looked to be a 50 year old woman who was about 70 to 100 pounds overfat.

The caption read.:

“I have high cholesterol.
I am at risk for heart disease.
I am 13 years old.”

OUCH!!

Even worse, there are now literally hundreds of thousands of kids all over the United States both boys and girls who look just like she does. Some of them have type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure too from the lifestyle they follow. We are already paying for their healthcare costs this causes too. Kids didn’t get those diseases in previous generations.

Many of them will grow up to face heart attacks and strokes before they are 45 years old. And, most frightening of all, many of them will need kidney dialysis -- or custodial care because they will develop early vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

The implications of this are truly dire. If that many of our adults who should be at the prime of life and effective in their work cannot work & generate that much more in health care costs, our economy will be swamped by it all.

And, although two of the 3 main causes of this are lack of exercise and eating a lot of refined grain an sweetened foods plus NOT eating fruits and vegetables, the third cause, drinking regular soft drinks instead of water, may be the most effective of the 3 in causing this situation.

Studies show that people, adults and kids alike, who drink a lot of soft drinks wear those calories as fat. The researchers have found the cause of this is very simple.: Soft drinks add calories to your food intake but simply don’t register in a way that makes you less hungry even a little bit.

Refined grain foods and sweetened foods are almost as bad; and a strong cause of the increase in obesity as is being totally sedentary; but soft drinks and the increase in their consumption are so much more effective at fattening people, they are clearly a major cause of this problem and may well be the number one cause.

So, causing most kids to drink no soft drinks at all, would be extremely desirable. Even causing a 40 % drop in the average number of soft drinks kids drink per week would help.

But studies show over 70 of adults drink soft drinks and have so little knowledge of these effects that they see nothing at all wrong with kids drinking the soft drinks they do.

The truly frightening thing is that the problem is so severe and getting worse so fast, there simply isn’t time or money enough to educate everyone to what’s happening in time to fix it.

But today’s news is much more encouraging.

Reuters online health news today has a story they released late yesterday. They titled it.

“U.S. experts argue for tax on sweet drinks.”

Kelly Brownell of Yale University in Connecticut & New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden are quoted as saying some very promising things. They apparently originally wrote those things in a New England Journal of Medicine article or in an interview that happened on Wednesday this week.

They state that a penny ounce tax on soft drinks would cut consumption by as much as 10 % and raise “billions of dollars” to help state and local governments with health education programs and health care costs driven by soft drink consumption.

Given that soft drinks in fast food places and restaurants cost the fast food places and restaurants something like 5 to 10 cents per dollar instead of the 30 cents that the food they serve does, a penny per ounce is trivial.

Given this and the severity of the problems caused by massive soft drink consumption, I don’t think they thought big enough. Five to ten cents an ounce would be much more desirable.

But I still enthusiastically applaud them. Once we tax soft drinks at such a trivially low rate and establish that they are a health hazard that should be taxed in the public interest and to keep our economy from collapsing from the effects of that hazard, the taxes will be raised later.

Cigarette and tobacco taxes have been; and soft drink and related taxes on comparable foods will too. Of course, that’s also the real reason the soft drink industry is against such a tiny tax.

The two experts were quoted as saying that even the penny an ounce tax would cut consumption by about 10 % & then they said this.:

"It is difficult to imagine producing behavior change of this magnitude through education alone, even if government devoted massive resources to the task."

I agree with them. With the tax, the effect is virtually guaranteed. And, the governments who badly need the revenue now TAKE IN money.

Needless to say the soft drink companies do not favor this idea.

They point out that as an industry they employ over 220,000 people in the United States.

But if they make that many people a year virtually unemployable due to physical or mental disability their product causes and cost our economy over 10 times the combined salary of all 220,000 people in avoidable health care costs each year, so what?

People often have to change jobs when the economy changes and renders a product or service obsolete. Most of those 220,000 people could also. In fact so many of them are in marketing and sales which are transportable skills, they may find it easier than people in most industries to get new jobs.

The article pointed out that studies show that children and adolescents now take in 10 to 15 % of all their calories in soft drinks and other sweetened drinks. That quite literally means if they drank none at all, they would be 10 to 15 % lighter on the average; and virtually all those pounds would be fat they no longer gained


Brownell and Frieden said the tiny tax would raise $1.2 billion in New York state alone.

That would come to something like 12 billion a year for the country as a whole.

And here’s their take on the real cost of soft drinks.:


"The contribution of unhealthful diets to healthcare costs is already high and is increasing -- an estimated $79 billion is spent annually for overweight and obesity alone -- and approximately half of these costs are paid by Medicare and Medicaid, at taxpayers' expense," they wrote.

"Sugar-sweetened beverages may be the single largest driver of the obesity epidemic," they added.

"For each extra can or glass of sugared beverage consumed per day, the likelihood of a child's becoming obese increases by 60 percent."

So, if we want better healthcare in this country, far fewer fat and sick kids and adults, and a stronger economy instead of one that is staggering under such avoidable costs, we should tax soft drinks everywhere in the United States immediately.

However, even a penny an ounce in a single progressive and health oriented state such as Minnesota or Iowa or Vermont might get us started.

But it’s quite clear that a 5 to 10 cent an ounce tax on all soft drinks—including diet soft drinks, & on high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and refined grains is actually what’s needed.

Still we have to start somewhere. Now that recognized health professionals have proposed this tiny tax on soft drinks, the worst offender, and have done so in the influential New England Journal of Medicine, we might get there in time to do some good & prevent the massive harm we are experiencing and paying for now; AND begin to keep it from getting worse.