Ex-Surgeon Gen. Koop’s R/x: Get in Spin and Stay Thin
WASHINGTON — Many people who want more exercise might have purchased a stair-climbing machine. Not C. Everett Koop.
He and his wife bought a three-story house “primarily for our hearts,” Koop said. He figures that, just by moving around his house, he gets 10 flights of exercise a day. And Koop, who is 78, wants the rest of America to do something similar.
The former surgeon general is leading a crusade to get the nation’s weight down and physical activity up. Shape Up America!, an arm of his C. Everett Koop Foundation, will try to join doctors, scientists, government officials and executives of health-related businesses in a concerted attack on obesity.
“It’s the No. 2 killer, after smoking and long before alcohol,” Koop said. “If I had stayed on as surgeon general, it would have been the first thing I tackled.”
About 300,000 people a year die prematurely of obesity-related conditions such as coronary heart disease and non-insulin-dependent diabetes, Koop said. Shape Up America! estimates the costs associated with unhealthy weight and sedentary lifestyle to top $100 billion a year.
Shape Up America! wants to get the major players in public health singing from the same hymnbook, and loud enough to make America listen. “What is needed now is a national mobilization that elevates healthy weight as a priority concern,” an organization policy statement said.
To a large extent, the group sees this as a marketing problem. It wants to issue books, videos and ads, and piggyback its message on retail tie-in ads. It signed on a Connecticut marketing firm to coordinate promotion. Koop counts on his own high-profile stature to keep reporters interested.
It also wants to encourage workplace and insurance incentives for weight loss. Healthier workers mean fewer sick days and lower disability claims, Koop pointed out.
It would like to see more physical education in schools. Lack of physical activity is a prime reason many children are overweight, and fat youngsters “become fat people who die sooner,” Koop said.
It wants doctors to focus more on their patients’ weights, especially what can be done to lower them. And it hopes for more federal funds for research into obesity, although Koop considers this unlikely in a budget-cutting Congress.
The bottom-line message is that even a little weight loss or activity gain--something realistic, within their ability--is good for people, because it can make them a little healthier.
Koop launched his program at the White House Dec. 5, at a ceremony hosted by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose own attempt to improve U.S. health care failed despite an even higher-profile start.
Koop does not have to face filibustering senators as the Clinton Administration did. But he sees risks in taking on too much, so he intends to avoid overreaching.
“I’m moving into it slowly,” Koop said. “We can’t let the campaign’s overhead get ahead of our income.” The organization is lining up corporate sponsors such as Kellogg, which could place health messages on its cereal boxes, he said. He also wants exercise-equipment companies and walking-shoe manufacturers to sign on.
The organization has some prominent scientists on its advisory body, and it lists institutions such as the American Medical Assn. as coalition members.
But myriad organizations have tried to encourage Americans to lose weight and add exercise before. The public seems stubbornly resistant to such advice. Depending on the survey, 40% to 60% of Americans do little or no exercise. And recent research found that about one-third of Americans are obese, compared with one-fourth in 1980.
So the organization is getting into the diet field. It won’t counsel Americans to lose all their fat. Koop wants to encourage “a long-term effort, not a crash diet.”
And the organization is not counting on immediate results. Koop sees the project “going on essentially in perpetuity, just the way that the anti-smoking campaign continues.”
