Obama's healthy diet plan
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Discover what works and what doesn't at healthy
diet plan
Carrie Budoff Brown Carrie Budoff Brown – Wed Jun 10, 2009
found at news.yahoo.com
President Barack Obama eats his vegetables and exercises every day — and he
really wants you to do the same.
From the White House garden to his picks for top health jobs, Obama is telling
America’s McDonald’s-loving, couch-dwelling, doctor-phobic populace that
things are about to change.
Don’t be fooled by the presidential burger runs. Obama and Congress are moving
across several fronts to give government a central role in making America
healthier — raising expectations among public health experts of a new era of
activism unlike any before.
Any health care reform plan that Obama signs is almost certain to call for
nutrition counseling, obesity screenings and wellness programs at workplaces and
community centers. He wants more time in the school day for physical fitness,
more nutritious school lunches and more bike paths, walking paths and grocery
stores in underserved areas.
The president is filling top posts at Health and Human Services with officials
who, in their previous jobs, outlawed trans fats, banned public smoking or
required restaurants to provide a calorie count with that slice of banana cream
pie.
Even Congress is getting into the act, giving serious consideration to taxing
sugary drinks and alcohol to help pay for the overhaul.
To some, it smacks of a “nanny state on steroids” — but for others who
fret that America is turning into one big Overeaters Anonymous meeting, Obama’s
prescription is like a low-fat dream come true.
“He has expressed more interest in preventing diseases and promoting health
than any previous president. It is not a breath of fresh air. It is a tornado,”
said Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the
Public Interest. “That contrast is breathtaking. This is really a rare
opportunity to make progress on so many issues.”
Discover what works and what doesn't at healthy
diet plan
Still, Obama needs to strike a balance between fashioning himself an advocate of
clean living and coming across as a public scold or a killjoy. That’s
precisely how some people view Jacobson’s group, which has denounced movie
popcorn, Chinese food and other indulgences that many Americans — including
Obama voters —enjoy. Clean living in balance is an appealing notion, but
finger-wagging moralism may not play so well in some precincts of Middle
America, where voters may decide government commentary on the size of their beer
gut or that plate of nachos isn’t such a good idea.
The public health community has worked intensively in recent years to build a
body of evidence in support of the very initiatives Obama and lawmakers are now
embracing. They frame the issue as one of money: Chronic diseases account for 75
percent of the nation’s $2 trillion in medical costs, according to the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention. And if the government encourages healthful
lifestyles, it could slow the rising cost of health care, though the exact
savings are debatable.
Obama has been leading the charge. He secured $650 million in the economic
stimulus package for prevention programs, and brought corporate executives into
the White House last month to highlight their success at lowering insurance
costs by investing in wellness.
“All this [is] designed to save taxpayers money, save businesses money and
ultimately make the American people healthier and happier and make sure that we’re
getting a better bang for our health care dollar,” Obama said after the
meeting.
Then there is the first family itself.
Barack and Michelle Obama sweat through a morning workout before most Americans
step out of bed. They receive almost as much attention for their toned bodies as
they do for their policies, which for the first lady includes an early
concentration on healthful eating. She made headlines worldwide for planting a
vegetable garden. And they marked their first Easter at the White House by
organizing an Egg Roll that focused on exercise.
Former President George W. Bush was equally devoted to fitness but never gave it
as prominent a role in policymaking as public health experts expect from Obama.
“I was always struck by President Bush, who was in terrific shape. It was a
lost opportunity on his part,” said Kenneth Thorpe, an Emory University public
health professor and leading advocate of chronic disease care. “President
Obama is very physically fit, and this is very much part of his personal
philosophy, and he has made it a centerpiece of health care reform.”
The whole situation has libertarians craving a basket of onion rings and a beer.
“If you care about the sorts of things I do, then you are going to be losing
big-time for the next four to eight years,” said David Harsanyi, a Denver Post
columnist and author of the book “Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling
Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists and Other Boneheaded Bureaucrats Are Turning
America Into a Nation of Children.”
Don’t get them wrong, critics such as Harsanyi say — they like broccoli and
they lift barbells and they have no particular beef with a healthy president who
was once described by his physician as having “no excess body fat.” They
just don’t like it when government becomes the messenger and the enforcer.
The appointment last month of New York Public Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden
as director of the CDC really made the libertarian-minded nervous.
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Frieden is a big part of the reason New Yorkers no longer smoke in bars or eat
trans fats at restaurants and find calorie counts on their menus. Frieden once
said that when anyone in New York dies at an early age from a preventable
disease, “it’s my fault.”
His groundbreaking approach to curbing chronic disease — heart disease,
diabetes, cancer — has been mimicked in cities across the country, including
Baltimore under Joshua Sharfstein, now the deputy commissioner at the Food and
Drug Administration. (One example is Sharfstein inaugurating a Salt Task Force
last year to study the "impact of excessive salt intake in the city.")
“Frieden’s stick-over-carrot, for-your-own-good approach to public health is
no longer confined to the Big Apple,” the industry-backed Center for Consumer
Freedom wrote on its blog. “Get ready, because the ‘nanny state on steroids’
is going national.”
An administration aide said it was too early to tell what approach Frieden would
take at the CDC, where he started Monday. In announcing the appointment, Obama
said Frieden’s “experiences confronting public health challenges in our
country and abroad will be essential in this new role.”
But other skeptics have critiqued the healthier-is-happier approach with the
numbers. An article this year in the journal Health Affairs concluded that
prevention measures usually add more to medical costs than they save.
Louise Russell, a professor of health and economics at Rutgers, examined
hundreds of studies over the past four decades and found that policymakers
needed to make “careful choices” about how to invest in prevention. She did
not look at savings such as added workdays that might be realized outside health
care spending because, she wrote, “the issue under debate is what happens to
medical costs.”
Yet Democrats are looking to ease the way toward more preventive services by
eliminating co-payments and deductibles. Members of the Senate Health,
Education, Labor and Pensions Committee want a federal Prevention and Public
Health Council to “develop a national strategy with public health goals and
objectives for the nation to achieve,” according to a committee briefing
paper.
“People do want to be healthy. It is just hard,” said Sen. Tom Harkin
(D-Iowa), a leading proponent of prevention policies. “When you walk into
places, the fastest, easiest food you can get is the saltiest and highest in
fat, highest in calories. I want something quick, but I want it low in all this
stuff. I want to give people choices so that they know, so when you put it on
the menu board, they know. I think most people, if they knew, they would take
better care of themselves.”
The bill released Tuesday by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
Committee orders chain restaurants with 20 or more locations to disclose
calories on the menu board and make more nutrition information -- fat,
cholesterol, sodium -- available upon request.
Republicans are no less on board. Some of the most conservative members of the
House and Senate, as sponsors of the Patients’ Choices Act, want to prohibit
junk food under the federal food stamp program and reward seniors who adopt
healthful behaviors with lower Medicare premiums.
“This isn’t about telling people what to do,” said Nick Papas, a spokesman
for Health and Human Services
Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “It is about giving people the tools they need to
live longer, healthier, happier lives.”
Whatever the case, libertarians like Michael D. Tanner, director of health and
welfare studies at the Cato Institute, aren’t looking forward to it.
“At the very least,” said Tanner, “we are going to get nagged a lot.”
Learn more about a perfect healthy
diet plan
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