Obesity described as the canary in the coalmine of western economic and political systems

A Southern Cross University academic has co-authored a book identifying the current trend towards increasing obesity in western society as the canary in the coalmine indicating our economic and political system is not serving us as well as it once did.

Professor Garry Egger, a Professor of Lifestyle Medicine and Applied Health Promotion at Southern Cross University and founder of GutBusters, co-authored ‘Planet Obesity: How We’re Eating Ourselves and the Planet to Death’ with Professor Boyd Swinburn, Professor of Population Health at Deakin University and a member of the International Task Force on Obesity.

Professor Egger said ‘Planet Obesity’ makes the case that obesity is the inevitable collateral damage in the battle for modernity.

“In the research we are doing on the connection between economic growth and development we are finding that as countries develop, and get richer and richer, their body mass increases in almost a linear fashion with the income that they earn,” Professor Egger said.

“Our economic system has been good for us as a society and no one is arguing with that, but eventually it goes past the point which is healthy and then it gets to a point, like we are here in Australia, where our average body mass index is 26.8 which is well over the 21 to 22 which is regarded as the average for optimum health in a country.

“What that means is that in the west we have overshot the sweet spot basically by increasing our income to the point where we over-consume things.

“By comparison you get the very poor countries, for example Burundi is down the bottom at the moment in terms of national wealth, and they have an average body mass index of about 19 which means that many people in that country are underweight.

“The whole point of the book is to get a discussion going so that people realise that this growth system that we live under has only ever been meant to get us to a point of comfort and well-being and beyond that it has always been going to have negative returns. The negative return in health is obesity and in the environment of course it is climate change. In the book we have tried to make the point that those two things are very similar.

“The similarities we have drawn are that type 2 diabetes happens when you get fat because the body has got too much sugar in the bloodstream and the muscles can’t soak up anymore; and the same thing happens in the environment where the environment gets too much carbon in the atmosphere but because we are chopping down trees and building houses and filling up the ocean and so on, there is no place for that extra carbon to go and we get global warming as a long-term consequence.

“There is nothing surer on this earth than we cannot continue to live under an exponential economic growth system forever. It just can’t happen. You can’t have indefinite exponential growth.

“This is serious, almost two-thirds of the Australian population is overweight or obese, although not all of that leads to disease or ill-health. In fact probably much less of it leads to disease than we thought 10 years ago. We are also still living longer than our ancestors. But there is already, and will continue to be, an increase in people not living well as a result of obesity.

“What we ideally would like to see is continued prosperity as we have been able to obtain through the current system but without the obesity. In relation to the environment, we need prosperity without the unmanaged down-side – pollution and climate change.

“We have to ask the question, what will it take to make us change the system that is no longer serving us? I accept that it is a big system to try and change but you have to start somewhere. You have to start talking about the situation because that is the first part of any successful health promotion.”

Professor Garry Egger will be delivering a presentation at the business conference accompanying the World Climate Summit in Cancun Mexico in late November where he will be pitching a pilot project he is developing that looks at personal carbon trading as a way of reducing climate change and obesity.

Professor Egger and Professor Swinburn have also been asked to develop their ideas further for an international book on the topic published out of the UK, the working title of which is 'Econ-obesity'.

'Planet Obesity: How We’re Eating Ourselves and the Planet to Death’ by Professor Garry Egger and Professor Boyd Swinburn is published by Allen and Unwin.

Photo: Professor Garry Egger is co-author of 'Planet Obesity'.