A group of doctors want President Obama to cut out the photo ops with cheeseburgers and hotdogs amid current obesity crisis.
photo by Kurt
We've all seen them. President Obama eating burgers. President Obama and guests chowing down on hotdogs. President and V.P sneaking out for burgers. Well now the non-profit group Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine asks the White House to issue an executive order banning staged photo opportunities that show the president, the first family, the vice president, and members of the president’s cabinet eating unhealthy foods—including processed meats—that can cause cancer and obesity.
“The White House would never set up a photo op showing the president buying cigarettes, so why is it okay to show him eating a hot dog?” says PCRM nutrition education director Susan Levin, M.S., R.D. “Processed meats like hot dogs kill more Americans each year than tobacco does, and they cost taxpayers billions of dollars in healthcare. As role model to millions of Americans the president has a responsibility to watch what he eats in public.”
Widely publicized photographs of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt eating a hot dog are credited with popularizing what once used to be a widely disliked food. Now Americans consume 7 billion hot dogs between Memorial Day and Labor Day each year.
The petition also contends that the photo ops, often held at restaurants, are akin to free product placement by the public officials. For instance, President Obama gave the Five Guys Burger and Fries chain a publicity boost when he stopped at one of its Washington outlets in 2009 with NBC news anchor Brian Williams.
Consuming processed meats increases the risk of colorectal cancer, according to a large number of studies, including the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study. A recent study from the Harvard School of Public Health says that a daily serving of processed meats, like hot dogs, sausages, and bacon, increases the risk of premature death by 20 percent.
More than 140,000 Americans are diagnosed with colorectal cancer each year. According to the federal Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, a third of all Americans are considered obese.
A
new study published in
The Journal of Preventive Medicine forecasts that 42 percent of the U.S. population could be obese by 2030.
The findings suggest the U.S. health care system could be burdened with 32 million more obese people within two decades. Action is needed to keep rates from increasing further, according to the research from Duke University, RTI International, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
So why should you care? According to a new report, the obesity problem is everyone’s problem. After all, almost two-thirds of adults and almost one-third of children in the United States are overweight or obese.
And according to the study, the number of overweight people in the U.S. will grow to almost 42 percent of the country by 2030, and cost a whopping $550 billion in obesity-related health care costs per year.
Obesity costs additional billions due to a loss of productivity, and U.S. military leaders have reported being overweight or obese as the leading medical reason why applicants fail to qualify for military service.
In conjunction with the study above The Institute of Medicine issued the following recommendations:
1 Make physical activity an integral and routine part of life.
2 Create food and beverage environments that ensure that healthy food and beverage options are the routine, easy choice
.
3 Transform messages about physical activity and nutrition.
4 Expand the roles of health care providers, insurers, and employers.
5 Make schools a national focal point.
“If so much of population has become overweight it can’t mean there has been a massive individual failure all of a sudden, over the past 20 years,” she said. “You have to say to yourself, ‘Why now? What has caused this?’”
She added that what the report is trying to do, if implemented in its entirety, is support the “personal responsibility” belief by providing people with choices that are “conducive to maintaining their weight.”
Kumanyika added that people have things “stacked against” them when it comes to weight maintenance, including static working environments, food options and availability, and seductive marketing that makes it cheaper and easier to eat poorly.
“If the environment has become so much more challenging then maybe people, in order to exercise personal responsibility, need more support (and) need different choices,” she said.