The Ontario’s doctors pointed to numerous anti-tobacco campaigns that have helped reduce the number of smokers, and called for the imposition of similar measures on obesity-causing foods. Anti-tobacco campaigns have helped to reduce smoking rates in Ontario from close to 50 percent in the 1960s to less than 20 percent today. Tax increases were the most important reason for this success, followed by public information (including disturbing images of diseased lungs and other graphic depictions of the negative effects of smoking), removal of retail tobacco displays, and advertising bans. To that end, Ontario should set an aggressive course with a comprehensive, multi-pronged suite of policies to reverse the course of childhood obesity.
Dr. Doug Weir, President of the Ontario Medical Association added: “We are raising a generation of children that will suffer from devastating and wholly preventable diseases, overwhelm the health system, and die prematurely. We need immediate and strong legal action to address what Ontario’s doctors are now seeing in the diabetes clinics and the stroke centers, and on the operating table: a full-scale public health crisis.”
“The time for gentle admonitions has come and gone. We need to fight this problem with proven tools like tax incentives and graphic warnings. There is an enormous body of evidence that these measures work.”
Images Via: Ontario Medical Association
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