A few weeks ago, I was listening to a radio interview with Sheena Iyengar who was discussing the research she did for her new book The Art of Choosing. Iyengar is a professor at Columbia University School of Business and a well-known expert on the study of choice - how we make choices and how they affect our lives. It is a subject close to the heart of anyone working in the field of chronic disease treatment and prevention with its focus on getting people to make the choices-particularly about diet and exercise-- necessary to stay healthy. Study after study has confirmed that educating individuals about risks and how to avoid them isn't enough to trigger behavior changes. So what else should we be doing?
Over the past few years we've been listening to a national debate about how to address America's obesity epidemic, which is costing us $147 billion each year and is a major contributor to diabetes, heart disease and some forms of cancer. It has also become an epidemic among our children, with one in six classified as obese.
Last month when the First Lady launched her Let's Move campaign aimed at reducing childhood obesity, questions about choice were very much a part of the conversation. Who and what are responsible for creating this problem? Americans are ambivalent about the question, with many believing it is a matter of individual choice. But public health officials see it a different way. They believe that we need to change our "obesogenic" environment, which promotes increased food intake, unhealthful foods and physical inactivity. Tom Frieden, who heads the Centers for Disease Control, is the lead author on a compelling article in Health Affairs about how to tackle the problem. And there is no ambivalence in his prescription for change:
"Reversing obesity is not going to be done successfully with individual effort. It will be done successfully as a society only with societal effort...We got to this stage of the epidemic because of a change in our environment. And only a change in our environment again will allow us to get back to a healthier place..." (more...)
