20190127_UA

Source: YouTube

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LaMdsmk99Y&t=4s

Date: 27/01/2019

Event: Boyd Swinburn: global syndemic is "the paramount challenge for the 21st century"

Credit: University of Auckland

People:

• Professor William Dietz: Director of the STOP Obesity Alliance, George Washington University
• Professor Boyd Swinburn: Professor of Population Nutrition and Global Health, University of Auckland

[Professor William Dietz (George Washington University) and Professor Boyd Swinburn (University of Auckland) co-chaired the 2019 Lancet Commission on Obesity. They explain how powerful vested interests and misplaced economic incentives are major drivers of the joint pandemics of obesity, undernutrition and climate change, and how we can tackle this global syndemic starting with grassroots action.]

William Dietz: When Professor Boyd Swinburn, my co-chair, and I began work on this we didn’t want another series of Lancet articles on obesity - there had already been two series - but we recognised that malnutrition included obesity and undernutrition, and both were associated with climate change as a result of agricultural production, so we'd looked at the intersection of undernutrition, obesity and climate change, and called this the "global syndemic". Syndemics are two or more pandemics which interact in time and place and are driven by societal or economic factors - for example, meat production generates a lot of greenhouse gases, and greenhouse gases increase climate change and catastrophic weather events in the developing world, which impairs agricultural production and contributes to undernutrition.

Boyd Swinburn: The scale of the global syndemic can feel overwhelming - in fact, malnutrition in all its forms is by far the biggest cause of ill-health and premature death in the world and in every country. Meanwhile, climate change will increase undernutrition and further deteriorate the environment - the global syndemic is the paramount challenge for the 21st century for humans, the environment and the planet.

The lack of government actions is what we call policy inertia, which is industry opposition to policies, government reluctance to implement policies and a lack of public demand for those policies. However, the promise of this syndemic view of these problems is that there are double and triple-duty solutions or actions which can affect all of these pandemics simultaneously. The current report provides a blueprint for how to transform those systems that are driving the global syndemic - for example, we need a 1 billion dollar fund to support community activation to demand policy action. Currently, the 5 trillion dollars of subsidies that go into fossil fuels and harmful agriculture need to be redirected towards sustainable agriculture and sustainable transport.

William Dietz: Another positive strategy is changing the business plan from one focused on profit to one focused on sustainability. We don’t pay the true costs of food nor do we pay the true costs of fossil fuels.

Boyd Swinburn: We are calling for a Framework Convention on food systems similar to the one on tobacco control which reined in the tobacco companies. We are also calling for a seven generations fund, taking the view from the Iroquois nation, about thinking seven generations hence, to build traditional knowledge and traditional ways of trying to manage health and the environment together.

William Dietz: We are not going to turn this around without local and state and country involvement. Social movements start at the grassroots level, and changing the global syndemic will require that kind of a shift.