By Rosie Mestel, Loa Angeles Times
Appeared Wednesday, March 10, 2004 in the Anchorage Daily News.
Poor diet and physical inactivity are closing in on tobacco use as the leading preventable causes if death in the United States, primarily because of a dramatic rise in obesity, according to a new scientific report.
The analysis, in today's Journal of the American Medical Association, reported that deaths caused by poor eating habits and sedentary lifestyle rose by 33 percent between 1990 and 2000 to an estimated 400,000.
Deaths related to smoking or exposure to tobacco came to 435,000. Their share of total U.S. deaths dropped from 19 percent to 18.1 percent since 1990. The number of deaths related to other preventable health threats, such as illicit drug use and environmental toxins, changed only slightly, the authors reported. "Our poor eating habits and lack of activity are literally killing us, and they are killing us at record levels," said health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson at a news conference in Washington D.C.
Another study released Tuesday from the Rand Corp. in Santo Monica, Calif., predicted that within the next 20 years obesity-linked disease in the United states will cancel out health strides in medical technology and disease-fighting measures, such as vaccinations.
The Rand study estimated that by 2020, about one in five health-care dollars spent on people ages 50 to 60 will be for obesity-related disabilities, if the current trend of overeating and inactivity continues.
Obesity is a very recent phenomenon," said Roland Sturm, a senior economist at Rand and First author of the report. "We're finding that it can reverse, or at least upset, the past trend toward better health. ... That's a pretty shocking finding."
Obesity experts said they were not surprised by these sobering statistics.
"We saw this coming," said Dr. Henry Anhalt, director of the division of pediatric endocrinology at New Yourk's Infants and Children's Hospital of Brooklyn. "We've seen the incidence of children and adults becoming overweight double in front of our eyes."
Anhalt said he has seen increasing numbers of children at his clinic with obesity-related conditions, such as high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver and diabetis-associated nerve damage.
The numbers are an underestimate if anything, said Dr. Michael McGinnis, senior vice president at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, N.J.
"Unless we turn this around somehow we may be seeing the first generation of children who are sicker and die younger than their parents," McGinnis said.