Waging War on Widening Waistlines

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 13, 2000 | by Joyce Howard Price

The government has started a campaign to make Americans slim -- but some don't want Washington `auditing' their meals and dictating their diets.

Uncle Sam, who started a fierce war on hunger in the 1960s, is now fighting an even tougher war on obesity. The federal government says paunchy Americans need to slim down and has initiated a public-education campaign to help them do that. The government hopes to persuade folks to eat nutritious foods that contain less fat and to start exercising.

It is not clear how extensive this undertaking will become or how much it will cost. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, or USDA, and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, are taking lead roles in the antiobesity crusade, and many nonprofit and private groups soon may join the battle.

"Right now, this antiobesity campaign is only in its infancy," says John S. Webster, spokesman for USDA's Center for Nutrition and Policy Promotion. How large it becomes "will depend on the health of the nation and whether obesity continues to be a growing problem, but we want to turn people around and give them assistance in eating nutritious foods."

Whether the government's war on obesity will rival the mammoth campaign it long has waged against smoking remains to be seen, but some officials do not rule that out. "Obesity has become epidemic in the United States," says William H. Dietz, director of the Division of Nutrition and Physical Activity at the Centers for Disease Control. `Although smoking is still a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, obesity is not far behind. These are two very different health problems, but they have one thing in common: They both cause needless premature disease, disability and death."

Not everyone agrees that the federal government should intervene on this weighty issue. "You may or may not agree that Americans are big, fat and overbloated," says Aaron Taylor, a spokesman for Citizens Against Government Waste. "But we can all agree the federal government is big, fat and overbloated, and this is a prime example."

But Webster says the USDA has been offering Americans nutrition advice since 1896. "Until now, food guidance from the Agriculture Department was not meant to be a weight-loss program, but one to promote a healthy diet."

The new campaign is targeting members of the same low-income minority populations that benefited most from food stamps and other federal antihunger programs. "Obesity is much more common in the lower socioeconomic classes," says Rajen S. Anand, executive director of the nutrition center.

Concerns about corresponding rates of obesity, high blood pressure and heart disease in the impoverished lower Mississippi Delta prompted the USDA to finance a research project in that region to find out what residents -- many of whom are illiterate -- are eating. The study, a partnership with researchers at six colleges in Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, will involve telephone interviews of adults and children in several hundred households in 36 counties in those states. Those who agree to participate in the study are asked to identify all the foods they've eaten in the past 24 hours.

Such programs prompt John Doyle, spokesman for the Guest Choice Network, a coalition of 30,000 restaurants and taverns, to claim the government is "auditing" what people eat. "This administration is so determined to worm itself into people's lives, they are talking about denormalizing foods to change behavior. It's a little intrusive and frightening."

Margaret L. Bogle, an official at the USDA's Agriculture Research Service and executive director of the initiative, denies that. "We won't be telling anyone that what they are eating is bad and that they should stop eating it," she says. "That doesn't work. Instead, we'll build on what they are doing. We might suggest they add this or try that. We're hopeful we can get them to increase fruit and vegetable consumption."

Federal health and agricultural officials aren't the only ones who see obesity as an enormous problem that must be reduced, however. Those that share that view include professional organizations such as the American Medical Association and the American Dietetic Association as well as other high-profile private groups, including the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the American Obesity Association, a nonprofit health-advocacy group that calls obesity a "ticking time bomb." The Journal of the American Medical Association devoted an entire issue to obesity, publishing a report blaming obesity for about 280,000 U.S. deaths annually.

It is disturbing to many health advocates -- both inside and outside the government -- that most USDA food programs do not comply with the department's own dietary guidelines for fat and nutrients. While the national school-lunch program came into compliance several years ago -- meaning that the fat content in school menus no longer exceeded 30 percent during a week -- other government programs such as food stamps do not comply with the dietary guidelines.