Boyd Swinburn: combating obesity at the community level.

摘要

Boyd Swinburn's fascination with the environmental and social roots of obesity can be traced back more than 20 years, to a Native American reservation outside Phoenix, AZ, USA. There, as a young medical researcher, he worked at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), studying the Pima Indians, a formerly successful civilisation suffering the consequences, such as alcoholism, violence, and poor mental health, of being displaced and marginalised by European colonists. The Pima Indians also famously suffer from a high prevalence of diabetes, and forthis reason they have been the subject of intense study by the NIH for more than 40 years.