WASHINGTON - Obesity experts offered a radical agenda Wednesday to reduce the growing ranks of overweight Americans, including proposals to tax high-fat foods and make insurers cover weight loss programs.
Calling the fat problem a "ticking time bomb in the health care system," many experts who gathered here for the first annual conference on obesity and public policy proposed several activist solutions. Among them: lengthening the school day to give kids more exercise, spending a lot more money to research the causes of obesity as well as the "fat tax" and expanded insurance for weight loss treatments.
More than half of adult Americans, about 97 million, are estimated to be overweight. Of those, 39 million are considered obese, or more than 30 pounds overweight. More than 20 percent of children are overweight, a number that has doubled in recent decades.
Extra pounds are more than unsightly. They contribute to 300,000 deaths each year. The annual cost of treating health problems related to obesity has been estimated at $100 billion.
"While we have this two-day meeting, 1,800 people will be dead from problems related to obesity," said Judith S. Stern, a professor of nutrition at the University of California at Davis and vice president of the American Obesity Association. "This is a national emergency."
Stern said her organization will push Congress for a fivefold increase in funding for obesity research at the National Institutes of Health, which now spends $103 million on it each year.
The nation's top doctor, Surgeon General David Satcher, is already convinced. "Obesity is a major public health problem in this country and one that deserves much more attention than it receives," he said Wednesday.