We're Losing the Global War on Flab: Eating Too Much Now Considered More Dangerous Than Terrorism

This just in from the You Can't Make This Stuff Up Department.

Flab kills more people than terrorism

A GLOBAL fight against flab would save more lives than the war on terror now that obesity-related chronic diseases have emerged as among the world's biggest killers.

Lawrence Gostin, a US government adviser who helped draft laws in the US to combat bioterrorism, will tell a global health summit in Sydney today that he considers chronic diseases the greater of the two threats to humanity.

"The human costs are frightening when we consider that obesity could shorten the average lifespan of an entire generation, resulting in the first reversal in life expectancy since data collecting began in 1900," Professor Gostin said.

The Oxford Health Alliance of private and public sector groups that want to reduce obesity and smoking rates will issue a "Sydney Resolution" during the three-day meeting, which starts today.

The resolution will be sent to Kevin Rudd ahead of the Prime Minister's own high-profile think tank, the 2020 summit, in April.

It will recommend ways to reduce sugar, fat and salt content in food, improve labelling, regulate advertising, make fresh food more affordable, workplaces healthier and cities more cycle- and pedestrian-friendly.

Summit facilitator Rob Moodie from the Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne said that eating too much, exercising too little and smoking were proving ultimately more dangerous than the acts committed by terrorists.

Didn't take much to figure out where this clown Gostin is coming from.

He worked on Hillary Clinton's health plan, serving as chairman of the health information privacy and public health committees of the President's Task Force on Health Care Reform. In the 1990s he was executive director of the National Council on Civil Liberties, the British equivalent of the ACLU.

While I certainly don't advocate people should let themselves go physically, to claim obesity is more a danger to our health than Islamic extremists is just absurd.