Supporting Volunteers in Their Personal War on Obesity with Reliable Information from Widely Available Health Science Journals

摘要

Obesity has made headline news throughout 2003 and there are no signs that interest in this topic will abate any time soon. A quick search on the index term "obesity" in the Factiva database on November 17, 2003 retrieved 426 hits when limiting results to the past three months. The severity of the growing problem of obesity has been highlighted by recent pronouncements from the nation's leading health authorities. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control, recently named obesity "the number-one health problem facing the [United States.]" Within days of this announcement, Richard H. Carmona, the U.S. Surgeon General, requested help from pediatricians to curb the marked rise of childhood obesity and, at the same time, introduced "Shaping America's Youth," a new anti-obesity Web site for physicians, teachers, parents, and others looking for strategies to combat childhood obesity. These two developments may have triggered recently proposed federal legislation that, if passed, would require U.S. restaurant chains to label each menu item with nutritional content information.