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Saturday, June 30, 2012

Why Mrs. Obama's Anti-Obesity Campaign is so Important

There is enough food in the world to meet everyone's need, not everyone's greed. (said Ghandi)

     America is an obscenely overfed population. We take up too much space (resources) on the planet.
Rather than insist that we abort to serve some population control agenda we should insist that people moderate their excesses-  If we got rid of obesity in America and Britain and other fat countries overnight an extra billion people could be fed.

   These are summaries of a few of the more brilliant comments of Lord David Alton, British House of Parliament.


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Universe Column
David Alton
July 15th 2012


Mother Teresa once appeared on a coast-to-coast American TV programme which she discovered, during the commercial break, was being sponsored by a company offering pharmaceuticals to reduce obesity. She left the advertisers running for cover when, in the next segment of the programme, she pointed to the cruel paradox that in Calcutta most people had hardly enough food to get them through the day – while in America some people ate so much that they ended up obscenely over- weight needing drugs or surgery.
Like Mother Teresa, Mahatma Ghandi, also commented on our insatiable appetite for endless consumption, remarking that there is “sufficient in this world for people’s needs but not for their greeds”.
The population control lobby -which includes Andrew Mitchell, the British Secretary of State for Development - endless attack people for having children. 
They would do better to listen to Mother Teresa and Ghandi and study a recent report by researchers from the London School of Tropical Medicine which found that if obesity were reduced it would be enough to feed an extra one billion people.
Researchers calculated that the weight of the global population at 287 million tonnes, of which 15 million tonnes is due to people being overweight, and 3.5 million tonnes due to obesity. 
Our failure to curb excess has a huge impact upon food supplies, water, energy use, and carbon emissions.
Although just 6% of the population live in the USA it is responsible for more than a third of obesity. Britain is seventh in the world league table of over-eating countries.
As Professor Ian Roberts explained: "When people think about environmental sustainability, they immediately focus on population. Actually, when it comes down to it - it's not how many mouths there are to feed, it's how much flesh there is on the planet."   Andrew Mitchell please note.
While some of the world starves too many are clearly doing the reverse; and, ironically, both starvation and over feeding can have the same fatal consequences.
So, by addressing the developed world’s spiralling obesity problem it would simultaneously reduce some of the pressure on the developing world – both in terms of their vicious population control programmes – such as China’s one child policy and India’s gendercide of little girls - and in combating the pricing of poor populations out of world food markets.


Hot on the heels of the report from the School of Tropical Medicine, a campaign supported by the Catholic Independent Crossbench Peer, the redoubtable Baroness (Sue) Masham, who Chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Health Group, was making its own headlines, and revealing a possible solution.
The campaign kicked off with a Reception at Westminster entitled “Obesity: The Real Costs”, organised by the National Obesity Forum (NOF), and supported by a national slimming organisation Cambridge Weight Plan. An Early Day Motion was tabled in the House of Commons calling for an overhaul of the way GPs are motivated to address Britain’s biggest health epidemic – and you can ask your MP to sign it.
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Dr Matt Capehorn, NOF Clinical Director and Clinical Manager of the Rotherham Institute for Obesity, told the Reception that more than 1.1m Britons are morbidly obese or super obese. An alarming 100,000 of these fell into the super obese category.� To put this in perspective, a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 18-25 is healthy, 25-30 is overweight, and 30+ is obese.�  A BMI of 40 – morbidly obese – is the level at which life insurance companies become more reluctant to give cover, as someone’s life is potentially threatened; a BMI of 50 is super obese.

Obesity specialist, Professor Tony Leeds, of London’s Whittington Hospital, and Medical Director of Cambridge Weight Plan, said the cost of treating these groups was substantially higher than previously thought:

“Compared to the non-obese, the medication costs (for heart, joint, gut, chest problems and diabetes) are doubled for those with BMI over 40 and are an extraordinary £6100 per annum (3.5 times higher) for those with a BMI over 50. The super obese could be eating up £450 million per annum in medication in their own right.”

Dr Matt Capehorn told MPs that Britain’s GPs are rewarded financially for recording the number of obese patients – yet, ironically, not for doing anything about it. So, while individual surgeries were pioneering “
best practice”, they had no incentive to do more than tick boxes.

He said: “
Merely drawing up a register will not prevent a single overweight person from developing type-2 diabetes or a single obese person from having a heart attack.”That is why the NOF is calling for reform of the Government’s Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) to reward GPs who guide overweight and obese patients into clinically proven weight-management programmes.Britain should urgently review the way GPs are incentivised through QOF, and open the door to organisations who help address this problem using programmes based upon quality, peer-reviewed, research to demonstrate that their diets work in their own right, and when administered by GPs.

It is not just the millions of people directly affected by obesity-related conditions
 such as diabetes, cancer, stroke, and heart attack. If obese individuals suffer, so do their families and friends, and the National Health Service faces an unsustainable future as demand continues to soar.
Gluttony is considered to be one of the seven deadly sins and in the thirteenth century St.Gregory the Great set out his own health plan - using Biblical examples that are drawn from the ancient wisdom of the Old Testament - and described five ways in which we might curb our excesses – by examining when we eat; the quality of what we eat; the stimulants we use; the quantity we consume; and the eagerness with which we pursue food. Its old wisdom which needs a new outing.
While we indulge ourselves in the over-consumption of food and become overweight and obese in the West, the poor starve in the developing world and face coercion to avoid having children. Tackling this crisis is becoming ever more a priority for the benefit of individuals, nations, and the poorest people in the world.
David Alton
(Professor Lord Alton of Liverpool)
House of Lords,
London SW1A OPW
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Roscoe Foundation for Citizenship, Liverpool John Moores University, 0151 231 3852 (fax: 0151 231 3853). 0207 219 3551 - House of Lords.
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To listen to a Roscoe Lecture: visit www.ljmu.ac.uk/citizen; then Roscoe Lectures; then multimedia.




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