Experts: Obesity, climate change and hunger must be fought as one
Maybe, when it comes to finding a way out of a global crisis of obesity, we’re just thinking too small.
Maybe the steps needed to reverse a pandemic of unhealthy weight gain are the same as those needed to solve two other crises of human health: malnutrition and climate change.
So instead of trying to tackle each of these problems individually, public health experts recommend that we lash the three together.
In a treatise published Sunday in the British medical journal Lancet, a multinational commission argues that consumers, business leaders and policymakers must focus their efforts on steps that address at least two of these crises at a time. Only then can they can resolve this trio of emergencies fast and fully enough to make a difference, they wrote.
And no, the experts added: Tackling climate change, world hunger and obesity all at once is not an overreach.
But, the commission warned, it will require an ambitious restructuring of the economic incentives that drive the production and marketing of food. It will require new kinds of transportation systems. And it will demand that consumers demand and help pay for food that is subsidized, raised and distributed in new ways.
And, the commission said, it will require governments to stand up to the world’s food manufacturing giants and the industries that support them — a collection of actors known as “Big Food.”
Made up of 43 public health experts from 14 countries, the Lancet Commission on Obesity emphasized that the problems of obesity, malnutrition and climate change are inextricably linked by factors such as overconsumption, unchecked marketing and government failures.
If consumers, producers and regulators take those links into account with each choice they make, humans might stand a chance of averting global catastrophe, the experts wrote.
This way of thinking is so novel that the commission created a word for the three-headed hydra they are trying to address: “syndemic.”
The World Obesity Federation’s Tim Lobstein, a member of the commission, described the syndemic of obesity, malnutrition and climate change as “a synergy of co-occurring pandemics which interact with each other in place and time and have common societal and economic drivers.”
Those common drivers include industries that are not required to pay for the downstream costs their products impose on the health of consumers or the environment, Lobstein said.
The result, according to the commission’s reckoning:
• Roughly 2 billion people worldwide are overweight, and despite the costly health risks that come with this trend, no country has succeeded in reversing the fattening of its population.
• Chronic undernourishment afflicts 815 million people in the world, and more than 200 million of the world’s children are stunted or wasted by hunger.
• The food production system that allows these trends to continue is a major contributor to climate change, which threatens to exacerbate these nutritional disparities by fueling floods, droughts and wildfires.
“A transformative social movement ... is needed to overcome the policy inertia,” the commissioners wrote. For that to happen, “a new narrative” is needed, they added.
They called for an international treaty — similar to those addressing tobacco use and climate change — to limit the political influence of agricultural and food production giants. And they recommend the redirection of $5 trillion in government subsidies away from harmful food products and toward sustainable alternatives.
Industries with commercial interests at stake will not yield without the kind of fight that has stymied change for decades, they wrote. Breaking their grip on policy will require funding from philanthropists to empower consumers’ demands for products, services and policies that feed the world healthier food produced with more respect for the planet.
Is such ambition fanciful?
“Changes around this issue have to begin at the local level,” said Dr. William Dietz, a professor of public health at George Washington University and one of the commission leaders. “To think this is going to happen right now at the national level is foolhardy.’
But some of the changes needed are already underway, Dietz said: Cities and states are raising taxes on sugary drinks and also aiming to meet goals set by the Paris climate treaty
The World Resources Institute estimates that consumer demand for food that is healthier and sustainably produced is growing by at least 5 percent a year, Dietz said.
The Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the nation’s leading manufacturers of foods and beverages, responded to the Lancet commission’s report with a call for cooperation.
The U.S. food, beverage and consumer product industry “shares a commitment to the well-being of consumers everywhere,” the GMA said in an emailed statement. “Only together can we solve some of the most pressing issues facing the world today.”
Marlene B. Schwartz, who directs the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at the University of Connecticut, applauded the commission’s willingness to look beyond the science of diet and call for broad-based action to change the way food is made and marketed.