Obesity Eclipses Tobacco as No. 1 Public Health Priority
A recent editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine has warned that health care reform, rising medical costs and childhood obesity have overtaken tobacco as the top public health priorities, even though smoking “remains by far the most common cause of preventable death and disability in the United States.” Titled “Don’t Forget Tobacco,” the opinion piece claims that federal, state and private efforts to reduce smoking “have seen their assets dwindle or their priorities change” as obesity comes to dominate the discourse. “Lack of insurance, childhood obesity and tobacco use are very different public health challenges, requiring different solutions. All three threaten the most vulnerable Americans,” opine the authors. “By assuming that the tobacco war has been won, we risk consigning millions of Americans to premature death.”
Meanwhile, a July 27, 2010, New York Times article fleshes out this trend, tracking the dollars diverted from anti-tobacco campaigns to address childhood obesity. According to the Times, the Obama administration has “awarded more funds to figh obesity than tobacco through two big new money sources for preventative health,” the economic stimulus package and health care reform legislation. Totaling $1.15 billion, this funding apparently sets aside $200 million “for tobacco-use prevention, but much more to grapple with obesity.”
Although the inequity has drawn criticism from anti-tobacco activists, it apparently mirrors state-level decisions to cut smoking cessation programs and redirect tobacco taxes into other public health efforts. Moreover, private foundations have followed suit, with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) purportedly pledging to spend $500 million in five years to tackle childhood obesity, a sum comparable to the $700 million it spent taking on tobacco companies. “When we made the commitment to spend $500 million in obesity, we made the commitment to see if we couldn’t do for childhood obesity what we did in tobacco,” RWJF Senior Vice Present James Marks was quoted as saying.
