Statewide Obesity Rates Still Rising
According to a new report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Trust for America’s Health, obesity rates climbed in 16 states, and did not decrease in any. Even worse, 12 states now have obesity rates of 30% or over. Four years ago, only 1 state had that distinction.
“Today, the state with the lowest obesity rate would have had the highest rate in 1995,” said Jeff Levi, Ph.D., executive director of TFAH. “There was a clear tipping point in our national weight gain over the last twenty years, and we can’t afford to ignore the impact obesity has on our health and corresponding health care spending.”
There’s an interactive map here.
“Until the government takes on the food industry, we’ll continue to see the appalling numbers in this report,” said Kelly D. Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, who was not involved in the report. “These numbers signal an emergency, and we simply have to have the courage and resolve to do more than what we’re doing.
“Government could start by changing agricultural subsidies, by not making it financially attractive for companies to market unhealthy foods, by placing serious restrictions on marketing to children, and with financial policies that make healthy foods cost less and unhealthy foods cost more.”
The nation’s roughly 4.5 billion excess pounds still skew heavily to the Southeast, with eight of the nation’s 10 most obese states clustered near the Gulf and Atlantic coasts and along the southern Appalachian Mountains. Among the top 10, only Oklahoma and Michigan — which had a 1.2% increase in adult obesity in the last four years, the largest of any state — are outside the South.
Good luck with getting restrictions on marketing to children in place, though. According to another LAT article, the food industry is having kittens over proposed FTC guidelines.
WASHINGTON–Advertisers and food and beverage industry officials called the government’s new guidelines for advertising directed toward children a “reckless” maneuver in light of today’s fragile economy.
After Congress asked the Federal Trade Commission, along with three other federal agencies, to develop a strategy to target childhood obesity, the FTC released a set of guidelines in April. They call on advertisers to encourage children to choose healthy foods and to limit the amount of saturated fat, trans fat, added sugars and sodium in food marketed to children.
…On Friday, industry officials pushed back, saying the guidelines would eliminate virtually all advertising presently directed toward kids under the age of 18. Only 12 of the 100 most consumed foods in the U.S. would meet the FTC’s criteria, said Dan Jaffe, executive vice president of the Association of National Advertisers.
“In discussing this with a broad cross-section of industry, the reaction is that the proposals here are so stringent and so unrelated to any question of whether the products that would be created would be palatable to consumers,” Jaffe said. “Just because you meet an arbitrary set of numbers doesn’t mean you can come up with products that will move off the shelves.”
If advertising takes as big a hit as industry officials expect, 74,000 jobs could be lost in 2011, said Mike Raimondi, vice president of IHS Global Insight, an economic forecasting company. Between 2011 and 2015, moreover, the cumulative lost sales in the food and beverage supply chain would amount to $152 billion, Raimondi said.
Jaffe is being disingenous, of course… The industry is happy with the status quo and feel it’s in their best interests to make sure nothing changes.
