Chronic disease expert Garry Egger says it would likely take an economic depression for the health of Tasmanians to dramatically improve short-term.
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The director of Sydney’s Centre for Health Promotion and Research said strong political and community will was required to improve the state’s health outcomes.
“Chronic disease is not getting any better in Tasmania or anywhere else in the country,” Dr Egger said.
“You’re dealing with an unhealthy environment – an obesogenic environment. All the riches and the types of food and economic advantages and economic advances are making us sick.”
Dr Egger will deliver the keynote address at the Tasmanian Health Forum on Saturday. He will speak in favour of a stronger focus on lifestyle medicine, a discipline that looks at the lifestyle and environmental factors associated with chronic disease.
“In infectious diseases we’ve been very successful in the last 100 years or so,” Dr Egger said.
“We’ve been able to define the causes of infectious diseases under one name: germs. Once we started to have a single focus on germs we came up with public health messaging, antibiotics, pasteurisation, all the things that help us cope with infectious diseases.”
But, Dr Egger said, chronic disease was unfortunately not so simple.
“With chronic disease we still operate in silos. There’s no one single determinant. There isn’t a single molecular cause we can attack like a germ.
“With chronic disease, everything interacts with everything else. They interact in a systems model rather than a linear model. Just prescribing a diet doesn’t work, it’s nowhere near as simple to deal with.”
Dr Egger pointed out that if there was a salmonella outbreak, authorities would track every factor leading to the problem to ensure it didn’t happen again.
“We’ve got to do that with chronic disease. We can’t just treat the risk factors,” he said.
“People eat a certain diet because of the factors that lead to that. It’s their upbringing, their relationship background, socioeconomic problems, the environment we live in, the growth environment. That’s the basis for all of this.”
But even Dr Egger admits his number one step to tackling obesity and chronic disease may surprise.
“I think one of the first things we can do is have a publicly-funded election campaign,” he said. “The people who can lobby government are food companies, oil companies, people who have enormous leverage. Publicly-funded election campaigns would get rid of all of that. The politicians will say that this doesn’t affect them but that’s rubbish.”