Article:Promoting healthy lifestyles will cut care costs

Promoting healthy lifestyles will cut care costs

DAVID CRANE

As concerns over the cost and affordability of health care grow,
long-overdue attention is at last being paid to the determinants of
health, how to be healthy rather than sick.

Rather than having to fund costly pharmaceuticals and surgery to deal
with chronic health problems, such as heart disease, emphysema,
diabetes and ulcers, more attention ‹ but still far from enough ‹ is
being paid to promoting healthy lifestyles that reduce the need.

Indeed, this is likely to be the most effective way to curb rising
health-care costs. The approach would also enable us to live more
active and productive lives.

Unfortunately, promoting healthier lifestyles can run into walls of
resistance. The tobacco industry fiercely resisted curbs on smoking
despite clear evidence linking smoking to lung cancer, heart disease
and the risk of stroke. The auto industry resisted curbs on auto
emissions and the oil industry on leaded gasoline and high-sulphur
gasoline, despite the growing problems of disease from air pollution.

Now, a new battle is being waged by the some in the food industry
against tough new standards for a healthy diet being promoted by two
agencies of the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the
Food and Agricultural Organization.

The two are co-operating on new global guidelines to reduce obesity, a
major source of diabetes, heart disease and stroke. The guidelines
include strict limits on the amount of sugar and fat in a healthy diet
as outlined in a new global code that the United States is resisting.

U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson said at a
recent World Economic Forum session in Davos, Switzerland, that the
United States wanted more time to study the guidelines. They have been
under development since 1989, leading to charges that the powerful U.S.
sugar lobby, which wants the new guidelines to contain a much higher
provision for sugar than the proposals have set, is unduly influencing
the U.S. stance.

Thompson, for his part, did not deny that unhealthy diets are a source
of major health problems in the United States. He pointed to many
initatives to reduce obesity and acknowledged the United States could
save billions of dollars in health-care costs, as well as having a
healthier and more productive population, through improved diet and
lifestyles.

Indeed, Susan Blumenthal, assistant surgeon-general in the United
States, said 70 per cent of diseases and 50 per cent of deaths in the
country are due to lifestyle factors, such as smoking, poor diet,
alcohol, obesity and unsafe sex.

Alfred Sommer, dean of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Medicine,
said 100,000 Americans undergo stomach stapling each year and 15
million qualify for gastric barometric surgery.

With globalization, obesity is becoming a global problem as Western
lifestyles spread to more countries.

"Other countries are starting to think like us, eat like us and now die
like us," Dean Ornish, president of the Preventive Medicine Research
Institute, said at the forum. He is working with PepsiCo Inc. and
McDonald's Corp. to produce healthier products.

But the spread of McDonald's shows what health officials are up
against. Between 1987 and 2002, according to Food and Agricultural
Organization estimates, the number of worldwide McDonald's outlets
increased to 31,108 in 2002 from 9,911 in 1987. China had 546 outlets
at the end of 2002, up from a mere three in 1987. In Japan, the number
increased to 3,891 from 604; in Latin America, to 887 from 99; and in
South Korea, to 357 from zero.

Kiyoshi Kurokawa, president of Japan's Science Council, said at the
forum that "in Japan 50 years ago, people were dying of starvation; now
we have seen a 100-fold increase in diabetes."

Janet Voute, chief executive officer of the World Heart Federation,
said heart disease is the Number 1 killer worldwide and obesity has
become a major factor. One-fifth of all children in Beijing are obese,
she claimed.

Many different groups will have to collaborate to reverse the dangerous
growth in the global problem of obesity.

Governments will need to adopt smart regulatory requirements as well as
promote healthy eating and exercise. Food companies and fast-food
chains will have to come up with healthier products. Parents will have
to educate their children in healthy eating and set an example.
Companies will have to pay more attention to employee health. Doctors
will have to give patients better advice.

If we are to have healthy populations and curb rising health-care
costs, however, we have no alternative.

--
Diva
******
There is no substitute for the right food