Judith Stern, a University of California-Davis professor of nutrition and internal medicine, discussed obesity in the U.S. at the D.W. Brooks Lecture. An excerpt:

“Every four days, 3,200 people die due to obesity. And behind the deaths are the individuals dealing with the disease.

“It’s time for all of us to ‘step up to the plate’ about obesity. We can’t do it alone. We absolutely can’t. The ‘us’ isn’t just consumers or fast-food restaurants. It includes the National Institutes of Health, the healthcare system, food industry, the Department of Transportation—for promoting inactivity and forgetting sidewalks—and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—for abnormally high standards of obesity drugs. Obesity is a chronic disease. It requires chronic treatment.

“Insurance companies cover healthcare costs for people who spent too much time in the sun and develop melanoma. They pay for liver disease treatment for those who drank too much and for lung cancer treatment for smokers. But they don’t recognize obesity as a disease. It’s the last area that’s seen as okay to discriminate.”

“The healthcare system is the house, and obesity is the hole in the roof. If you don’t fix the hole, every time it rains, the furniture and rugs are going to get damaged. . . . We spend billions each year on heart disease, asthma and other illnesses that have been proven to get better as obesity goes down. But research and healthcare don’t address obesity’s ‘why.’ ”

“We suffer from portion distortion. . . . The U.S. Department of Agriculture says one serving of a muffin is 100 calories. The mega muffin has 800 calories. Who cuts a mega muffin into eight pieces and shares it with seven other people?
“I don’t.”