NEW ORLEANS (AFP) — The fight against obesity can only be won if tackled with the same determination as the decades-old US campaign to end cigarette smoking, leading experts in America's battle of the bulge say.
"It took almost 40 years to start to change tobacco, and I think we are already beginning to change obesity," said William Dietz, who directs programs related to chronic disease prevention at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dietz spoke to AFP on the sidelines of a major conference this week organized by the Obesity Society, an organization of researchers dedicated to ending what has become one of America's most serious health problems.
Nearly 200 million Americans -- fully two thirds of the US population -- are considered overweight or obese.
Americans' widening girth is responsible for a host of ailments, including diabetes, hypertension and heart disease. Obesity is now the second-leading cause of death across the United States.
Obesity-related illnesses, which afflict millions of Americans, cost at least 97 billion dollars per year in health care costs.
The situation is also dire among America's youth: 17 percent of children are overweight, with increasing numbers developing what once were considered "adult diseases" like high blood pressure, type II diabetes, heart disease and asthma.
But experts like Dietz point out that a generation or two ago, the statistics related to cigarette smoking seemed equally bleak, before concerted efforts by federal and local officials managed to turn things around.
"What worked was multiple interventions and multiple settings that included things like tobacco taxes, laws that prohibited minors from getting access to cigarettes, banning smoking in public buildings, getting cigarettes machines out of hospitals," Dietz told AFP.
"No single one of those made a difference, but together they made a significant difference."
For the anti-fat fight to yield similar results, efforts must be stepped up dramatically, according to Eric Ravussin, a professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
"We need more research to see what are the best strategies of prevention," the Swiss-born Ravussin said.
While the federal government is leading many key initiatives, much of the work also being done at the local level.
The Los Angeles City Council, for example, recently started talking about a moratorium on new fast-food places in the city's impoverished South Central section, in a bid to fight poor health.
And in the southeastern state of Arkansas, public schools have unveiled an aggressive anti-obesity campaign, urging greater participation in sports, offering students better nutritional education and emphasizing frequent weight monitoring at school, with the results sent home to parents once per year.
The approach appears to be working. The obesity rate, which had risen among Arkansas's youths for decades, has stabilized from 20.9 percent in 2005 to 20.6 percent this year.
Another bright spot appears to be among American women.
One study, the National Health Examination Survey, has found that the rate of obesity has stabilized among women between 1999 and 2004, even as it continues to climb higher among children, teens and adult men.
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