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Long term obesity plan needed
18 November 2010.
The Australian Labor Party and Liberal/National Coalition must reveal their plans to tackle obesity – the state’s most pressing public health issue – before the 27 November election, AMA Victoria President Dr Harry Hemley said today.
"The next Victorian Government must get serious about beating Victoria’s battle of the bulge," he said. "Three quarters of Victorian men and more than half of Australian women are overweight or obese. This leads to higher rates of illness and poses a great financial burden on the health system."
Dr Hemley said the next Victorian Government needed to help individuals make healthy dietary choices by introducing simple traffic light nutritional information on all foods. AMA Victoria has also put proposals to the Government and Opposition to improve community infrastructure, ban junk food in government buildings, and fund multidisciplinary obesity clinics.
"We need an obesity strategy that focuses on prevention – healthy eating and exercise – but Victoria’s obesity plan must also increase access to surgery for morbidly obese Victorians who have exhausted other weight loss avenues and can’t afford private surgery," he said.
"Bariatric surgery is the last resort for people with morbid obesity. We’re not talking about people who can’t shed the few extra kilos they’re carrying. Morbid obesity means the person is carrying so much extra weight that it’s likely to significantly shorten their life.
"This type of surgery should only be offered to morbidly obese people who have repeatedly failed in their attempts to lose weight and who commit to a strict eating and exercise regime and medical follow-ups."
Dr Hemley said simplifying food labelling could help reduce waist lines by ensuring Victorians had good information on their food choices. "A traffic light food labelling system would help people control their weight, and hopefully, encourage food companies to limit the sugar they add to everyday items," he said.
"A simple way of identifying food high in kilojoules will help people make informed decisions about what they eat. Red light foods are those high in energy, and most likely to contribute to obesity; green light foods are the most nutritious and should dominate the shopping trolley; and orange light foods are somewhere in between.
"I wouldn’t expect everyone to eat only green-light and orange-light foods, but I would hope that people would avoid filling the shopping trolley with red-light products unless they were planning on expending a lot of energy."
Dr Hemley said the next Victorian Government could also reduce the adverse health outcomes of obesity by banning artificial trans fats in processed foods.
"Chips, biscuits and pastries contain harmful trans fats which increase blood cholesterol level. These fats are completely unnecessary. The next Government must challenge the food industry to remove these harmful trans fats from the foods they produce."
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