Wise words from Dr. David Katz on ‘Fixing Obesity’ ‘As a culture, we are drowning in calories of mostly very dubious quality, and drowning in an excess of labor-saving technology. I have compared obesity to drowning before, but want to dive more deeply today into the implications for fixing what ails us. The distinction between drowning in water, and how we contend with it, and drowning in calories and sedentariness, is the cause-and-effect timeline. In the case of water, drowning happens more or less immediately, and there is no opportunity to dispute the trajectory from cause to effect. In the case of obesity, there is no immediacy; the drowning takes place over months to years to decades. It’s a bit blurry. The only real distinction between drowning in water and drowning in calories related to causality is time. One hurts us immediately, the other hurts us slowly. The other important distinction is magnitude.

People do, of course, drown, and it’s tragic when it happens. But obesity and chronic disease affect orders of magnitude more of us, and our children, and rob from us orders of magnitude more years of life, and life in years.’ And the take-away with all of this… Obesity is not complicated. And neither is fixing it. Hard, yes; complicated, no! http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130517131148-23027997-fixing-obesity?trk=eml-mktg-condig-0108-p1