Happy to announce a new article from Luc Hagenaars, Grant Ennis, and myself in JAMA Health Forum on the “Harms of Framing Obesity as a Disease of Individuals.”
GLP-1s have been heralded as wonder drugs, finally providing relief from obesogenic environments filled with the advertisements, ubiquity, smells, and marketing of ultraprocessed foods (UPFs). Instead of fixing our environment, we have reconciled to try to help individuals, one at a time, to overcome this collective dysregulation problem.
We argue that this individualized approach will never address the problem of obesity as an epidemic; and that instead, we need to model our approach similarly to how we did with tobacco. Yes, doctors provide smokers with nicotine replacement therapy, counseling, and other therapies; but they are united in supporting tobacco taxes, clean air (smokefree) policies, and denormalization of the disease vector. Similarly, doctors treating obesity must help individual patients; but even more importantly, they should be petitioning for stronger regulations around the production, marketing, and subsidies that make ultraprocessed foods the default for so many. As medical authorities, we need to take a public health stance, addressing the upstream drivers of obesity. Otherwise, we will spend the rest of our careers doing poor triage – missing those most vulnerable to obesogenic environments who fall through the cracks of individualized health systems.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2848130
