What’s Mississippi Doing About Obesity? - WSJ

AS IMPORTANT AS THE ARTICLE, PLEASE TAKE THE TIME TO READ ALL OF THE READER'S COMMENTS -- TAKEN AS A WHOLE, THEY PAINT A PICTURE OF THE REAL STORY OF THE OBESITY EPIDEMIC!!!

What’s Mississippi doing about obesity? That’s what the Health Blog wanted to know after reading yesterday’s report that ranked Mississippi the most obese state in the nation.

So we called Ed Thompson, Mississippi’s interim state health officer, who was quick to argue that there’s no clear evidence on how public interventions affect population-wide obesity rates.
“Frankly, medical science does not yet know with certainty how you can reduce obesity in a population,” Thompson said. “We know how to reduce obesity in an individual. It’s simple: eat less and exercise more. But that’s hard to operationalize.” Most health iniatives are based on common sense, he said. “The answer to the obesity epidemic is not programs with clever names.”