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Obesity on track as No. 1 killer

By Nanci Hellmich, USA TODAY
CHICAGO — Inactive Americans are eating themselves to
death at an alarming rate, their unhealthy habits fast
approaching tobacco as the top underlying preventable
cause of death, a government study found.

Poor diet and lack of exercise might end up killing
more people than tobacco use and become the leading
cause of preventable deaths in the USA by as early as
next year, a new study says. (Related story:
Anti-obesity public service ads may be too much to
stomach)

Diet and physical inactivity accounted for 400,000
deaths in 2000, or about 16.6% of total deaths.
Tobacco, with 435,000 deaths, was 18.1% of the total,
says research in today's Journal of the American
Medical Association.

"This is really a tragedy," says Julie Gerberding,
director of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention and one of the authors of the study.
"Obesity is the overt manifestation" of poor diet and
sedentary lifestyle, and it's a "preventable risk
factor," she says.

Smoking rates are dropping, but Americans are
increasingly overweight. That's why obesity probably
will overtake smoking as the leading preventable cause
of death by 2005, says CDC epidemiologist Ali Mokdad,
another study author. Almost 65% of Americans weigh
too much, increasing their risk of heart disease,
diabetes and cancer.

On Tuesday, the government announced two ways it
intends to help: by running public service ads on the
importance of controlling weight and by paying for new
obesity research.

For the latest study, CDC researchers reviewed about
1,000 studies linking certain behaviors and death, and
they came up with an equation that determines the
actual risk from those behaviors. Often, more than one
cause or condition contributes to a single death. The
top killers are heart disease, cancer and stroke. The
researchers say poor diet and inactivity are
considered "modifiable" behaviors that give those
killers ammunition.

Nutrition experts say Americans must take this news
seriously. "Obesity and unhealthy lifestyles are now
the most important public health problems of this
century," says Samuel Klein, director of the Center
for Human Nutrition at Washington University School of
Medicine in St. Louis.

"It's not just the increase in premature deaths that's
a problem, but also the illness, disability, suffering
and economic costs that go with it," he says.

Roland Sturm, a senior economist with Rand Corp., a
research think tank, says Americans have been getting
healthier and living longer. But he says that if the
obesity rate continues to rise, "it will reverse that
trend." People now in their 40s will develop
conditions such as diabetes, arthritis and back pain
that will reduce their quality of life, he says.

In a study in the March issue of Health Affairs, Sturm
predicts that by 2020, one in five health-care dollars
spent on people ages 50 to 69 could be for medical
problems related to excess weight.

"People need to get off the train of overeating,
gaining weight and being sedentary," says George
Blackburn, associate director of the division of
nutrition at Harvard Medical School. "These are
400,000 avoidable, premature deaths that wouldn't
occur if we didn't overeat and weren't coach
potatoes."

Gerberding says she would like to see Americans take
small steps to a healthier lifestyle, and those steps
would "add up to a more fit body. That means eating
healthy foods in healthy portion sizes and finding
ways to incorporate exercise into their everyday
lives."



Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2004-03-09-obesity_x.htm