Can we cure Obesity like we cured Cholera?
I was doing an Internet search for information about the Obesity epidemic and how it affects us financially when I came across a great article that is now about 6 years old but remains spot on when it comes to “Fixing a Fat Nation“. The fact that this article was written half a decade ago and we are only getting fatter makes their case only stronger.
Here are some of the key points:
“About 150 years ago, Americans were dying from old-fashioned infectious-disease epidemics. Between 1813 and 1850 in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and New Orleans, death rates increased by 42 percent thanks to such burdens of newly industrializing cities as crowding, dirty water, and open sewers. Cholera epidemics killed people by the tens of thousands.
The age’s medical experts didn’t actually know much about the causes of such diseases or how to fight epidemics. But noticing that poor immigrants in the filthy slums of port cities like Boston and New York were particularly likely to get sick and die, they concluded that their eating and drinking habits were “intemperate”; that, as public health historian John Duffy writes, “the basic problem with the poor lay in their lack of moral fiber.” The poor had no one but themselves to blame for their diseases. They needed to be taught a combination of personal hygiene and resistance to sin.”
Then Edwin Chadwick published The Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population, which argued that miserable working and living conditions made the poor sick and argued for ensuring clean water, building sanitary sewers, removing animal carcasses, and providing decent housing. The result was a virtual elimination of the infectious disease epidemics and between 1850 and 1915, death rates fell by 55 percent.
The solution was public health reform which was undertaken for people, rather than by people. As a society it may clear our conscience to say that obese people can control their habits in eating and exercise, but it will not touch the epidemic
If we are to “cure” obesity it will take another great public health reform but there’s our cherished individual freedom. Some of our fierce individualism spills over into a vague feeling among eminently reasonable Americans that the government shouldn’t be telling its people where they can or can’t put a vending machine, and also translates into the sense that health is an individual responsibility.
If we keep this attitude it will not be long before obesity is killing far more than 325,000 Americans a year.
