Changing the Rules
You should exercise more. You should eat less. You should make better food choices. You should make your overall health a higher priority.
Well, duh.
You’d be hard pressed to find someone who can honestly claim ignorance to the basic tenets of weight management – and yet, the American obesity epidemic continues to grow at an alarming rate. If simple knowledge doesn’t help people, what will? That’s the question we considered for our most recent Monterey Herald column.
Some of these ideas might sound silly, and some might even be controversial (would you like a “sin tax” on your next box of Oreos?), but they all make fairly good sense when it comes to changing our collective lifestyles and giving people an effective (read: financial) incentive to take their health more seriously.
*
Running Life 8/13/09 “Fighting Obesity”
The Center for Disease Control recently sponsored the first “Weight of the Nation” conference, where it was announced that the medical cost of obesity in the United States each year is $147 BILLION. Almost one-third of American adults are officially categorized as obese, with rates in many (mostly Southern) states approaching 40%. Even Oprah Winfrey is overweight again.
What’s the solution? The CDC has a standard laundry list of recommendations to stop the obesity epidemic, but it’s the same things we’ve been told for years: healthier food choices, lower caloric intake, more physical exercise. This is all old news, yet obesity rates continue to rise.
So we’d like to suggest some changes in perspective for all of us – the first of which is to encourage support from selected “influencers” who can connect with large numbers of people.
One such program is right in our backyard: the Big Sur International Marathon’s JUST RUN program. As we said, the formula for what works is no secret: less food, more activity. The Just Run program instills this lesson in elementary school children, and gives them opportunities to make healthy choices from a very early age. Good habits start young, and increased funding for programs like this can attack the obesity problem at its roots.
Our educational system can go one step further and make physical education mandatory in all schools. Programs can be supported with minimal cost, even at schools without a dedicated PE teacher – all it takes is a committed volunteer to get students walking or jogging every day. Isn’t healthy activity just as important to our kids’ quality of life as art, music and great literature?
Parents play a key role as well. We should teach our kids to be participants in athletics instead of spectators. Modern-day sporting events (and their accompanying advertisers) emphasize tailgating, beer drinking, and pigging out on unhealthy food just as much as they inspire sandlot games and schoolyard shoot-arounds. It’s our job as parents to remind kids that the real fun of sports is in doing, not watching.
Professional sports leagues can even get in on the act. Imagine if championship sporting events had associated running races, like a marathon on Super Bowl Sunday, or a 5K before the local pro golf tournament. Have the pro athletes make an appearance beforehand, or provide the runners with discount event tickets to encourage participation, and you can draw huge numbers towards healthy activities.
Another approach is to borrow a page from the anti-smoking playbook, and make it cost-prohibitive for people to be unhealthy.
For instance, what if you had to pay for exorbitant cable or Internet screen time in the same way that you pay for excess usage of water or electricity? Since obsessive screen watching makes people less active and more obese, how about creating a graduated “sin tax” beyond a certain threshold? A similar fee could be tacked onto junk food like cookies or pork rings at the grocery store, or against most fast food menu items, which might make people think twice before grabbing another Big Mac at the drive-thru.
Insurance companies can base their premium rates on physical fitness tests like the ones that used to be given in grade schools. Cardiovascular fitness is the most important predictor of overall health – and if you struggle with a one-mile walk, chances are that your health is lousy. People can be recertified at the local track every 2 or 3 years, just like smog inspections, where an independent timer verifies your best mile time, and your insurance rates would correspond to your result. Would that make you take your fitness more seriously?
Sure, these ideas may sound crazy – but that’s indicative of a larger problem as well: a complacency to let things carry on the same way they’re currently going, and a reluctance to make dramatic moves towards changing course. If prioritizing our health continues to be seen as the “counterculture” approach, we’re in for far more troubling costs in the days ahead – both from a health standpoint, and a financial one.
Well, duh.
You’d be hard pressed to find someone who can honestly claim ignorance to the basic tenets of weight management – and yet, the American obesity epidemic continues to grow at an alarming rate. If simple knowledge doesn’t help people, what will? That’s the question we considered for our most recent Monterey Herald column.
Some of these ideas might sound silly, and some might even be controversial (would you like a “sin tax” on your next box of Oreos?), but they all make fairly good sense when it comes to changing our collective lifestyles and giving people an effective (read: financial) incentive to take their health more seriously.
*
Running Life 8/13/09 “Fighting Obesity”
The Center for Disease Control recently sponsored the first “Weight of the Nation” conference, where it was announced that the medical cost of obesity in the United States each year is $147 BILLION. Almost one-third of American adults are officially categorized as obese, with rates in many (mostly Southern) states approaching 40%. Even Oprah Winfrey is overweight again.
What’s the solution? The CDC has a standard laundry list of recommendations to stop the obesity epidemic, but it’s the same things we’ve been told for years: healthier food choices, lower caloric intake, more physical exercise. This is all old news, yet obesity rates continue to rise.
So we’d like to suggest some changes in perspective for all of us – the first of which is to encourage support from selected “influencers” who can connect with large numbers of people.
One such program is right in our backyard: the Big Sur International Marathon’s JUST RUN program. As we said, the formula for what works is no secret: less food, more activity. The Just Run program instills this lesson in elementary school children, and gives them opportunities to make healthy choices from a very early age. Good habits start young, and increased funding for programs like this can attack the obesity problem at its roots.
Our educational system can go one step further and make physical education mandatory in all schools. Programs can be supported with minimal cost, even at schools without a dedicated PE teacher – all it takes is a committed volunteer to get students walking or jogging every day. Isn’t healthy activity just as important to our kids’ quality of life as art, music and great literature?
Parents play a key role as well. We should teach our kids to be participants in athletics instead of spectators. Modern-day sporting events (and their accompanying advertisers) emphasize tailgating, beer drinking, and pigging out on unhealthy food just as much as they inspire sandlot games and schoolyard shoot-arounds. It’s our job as parents to remind kids that the real fun of sports is in doing, not watching.
Professional sports leagues can even get in on the act. Imagine if championship sporting events had associated running races, like a marathon on Super Bowl Sunday, or a 5K before the local pro golf tournament. Have the pro athletes make an appearance beforehand, or provide the runners with discount event tickets to encourage participation, and you can draw huge numbers towards healthy activities.
Another approach is to borrow a page from the anti-smoking playbook, and make it cost-prohibitive for people to be unhealthy.
For instance, what if you had to pay for exorbitant cable or Internet screen time in the same way that you pay for excess usage of water or electricity? Since obsessive screen watching makes people less active and more obese, how about creating a graduated “sin tax” beyond a certain threshold? A similar fee could be tacked onto junk food like cookies or pork rings at the grocery store, or against most fast food menu items, which might make people think twice before grabbing another Big Mac at the drive-thru.
Insurance companies can base their premium rates on physical fitness tests like the ones that used to be given in grade schools. Cardiovascular fitness is the most important predictor of overall health – and if you struggle with a one-mile walk, chances are that your health is lousy. People can be recertified at the local track every 2 or 3 years, just like smog inspections, where an independent timer verifies your best mile time, and your insurance rates would correspond to your result. Would that make you take your fitness more seriously?
Sure, these ideas may sound crazy – but that’s indicative of a larger problem as well: a complacency to let things carry on the same way they’re currently going, and a reluctance to make dramatic moves towards changing course. If prioritizing our health continues to be seen as the “counterculture” approach, we’re in for far more troubling costs in the days ahead – both from a health standpoint, and a financial one.
12 comments:
I LOVE the idea of fitness certification for health insurance!!! Love it. May be not based on internet search time, since I do plenty of that:) But, you know, if you can surf TV and computer and still fit in workouts, more power to you! Lets propose it to the goverment!
As always, an excellent post!
It might help if the healthful food was affordable and the unhealthy stuff was not. It's the opposite now and one reason obesity is highest among low-income families -- they can't afford to continually eat "real food" and instead are forced to shop at discounters selling crap for cheap. School systems also need to go back to serving good food to the growing "free lunch" kids instead of sleeping with the fast food vendors to make a buck.
The pictures you included were killin' me! But, so "normal" anymore. Speaking of normal - I am so annoyed with that show "More to Love" or what I call The Fat Bachelor. ;) Promoting it by saying they are showing "real women." Nothing like promoting fat as normal and thin as unrealistic. But, enough of my ranting. . . .
As for your "sin tax", I don't think it'll make a difference. Has it really stopped people from smoking? If people want something, they'll pay what it costs. (They'll complain a lot, but they'll pay.)
Excellent column, Donald, and very thought-provoking. I especially like the scenario where junk food would become violently expensive. And how about rewarding those who buy fruits and vegetables? Buy two bags of carrots, get two bags for free; buy one watermelon, get another free; etc., etc.
A-men, brotha! I don't really believe that physical education should be mandatory in schools (gym was a particularly unpleasant and humiliating experience for me in high school), but there should be incentives for extracurricular sports.
As far as the "sin taxes," I don't know why they haven't already been put in place! (Oh yeah, all those junk food lobbyists in Washington). But with entire states declaring bankruptcy, how can we NOT charge all the fat asses who are draining money from the rest of us.
And I like the idea of fitness inspections, but I've got another idea: People should be forced to stand in front of a group of snotty high school students in their underwear for 10 minutes and take the ridicule. It'll be a bit like high school PE, but in a different way!
Love it! I may be wrong, but I believe PE is the only subject, at least in elementary school, with mandated minutes to be taught each week - 100 minutes per week. I love the Just Run program, and our district instilled something similar for K-5 kids. Running and cross country have become popular here in the middle of nowhere. Now our cafeteria is on board with a MUCH healthier meal program, including salad bar every day! There IS hope, we just have to keep inspiring.
A good place to start would be to reduce the amount of fructose in most everyone's diet. The agricultural lobby in this country does not have the health interests of people in mind. Take a look at this lecture by one of the top obesity docs: http://theorytopractice.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/sugar-the-bitter-truth/
Most of the fructose people eat goes straight into forming fat in the liver (which the liver tries to unload by secreting it as triglycerides and LDL), and leads directly to insulin resistance and obesity. This is also true for carb overfeeding, which many people do without realizing it. In the lecture, he explains how the metabolism of fructose and ethanol are similar- both are toxins that the liver must metabolize so that the rest of the body is protected.
Many people find that if they decrease carbs they can lose weight and keep it off without large amounts of exercise (or even any exercise). Both my boys lost quite a bit of weight when they stopped drinking sweetened sodas and teas, without any other changes in lifestyle.
But exercise is good too in many ways, including increasing insulin sensitivity and lowering blood glucose, all of which decrease insulin levels and help the person burn fat more often. If you can't burn the fat, it just accumulates.
As for pork rinds, they have zero carbs and will help you lose weight! Please don't compare cookies with pork rinds- that's like confusing porkchops with cake!
See you on the trails someday!
Cynthia
I used to be a member of Spectrum Gyms they had a tie in with Virgin Healthcare ( not in CA :-/ ) go to the gym, pass the basic tests get cheaper healthcare! Now there's a no brainer!!
Gym membership is tax deductible if you're clinically obese!
Oh yeah and obesity, poor cardiovascular health and diabetes are all social diseases; bad food is cheap!
Good writeup.
There's actually some companies doing very similiar thing with insurance programs, today. One insurance company I know of works with companies to setup a plan that pairs employees with HRM's, and they must log a specific number of hours each week in order to stay on the insurance plan. John Deer (the equipment company), did just this with one of it's call centers that they were planning mass layoffs in, and through the use of this trial program were actually able to reduce healthcare costs so much that they were able to avoid the layoffs. Pretty interesting stuff. The concept is currently being lobbied aground congress a bit.
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