Wednesday, 13 March 2013, 6-7pm
Venue: King's College London, Room 1.16, Franklin Wilkins Building, Stamford Street, London SE1 9NH; Nearest tube and rail: Waterloo
Geof Rayner PhD City University
Changing people, culture or the world? Social scientific remedies for non communicable diseases: an ecological public health approach
The media attention given to obesity, is now - obviously - massive, as also is the attention given to it by policy makers and social scientists. The latest (February) report of the Academy of Royal Medical Colleges presented 10 recommendations for change, only two of which relate to medical care. Medicine, it was said at the launch of the report, "won't fix the problem". My presentation will sketch the multiple ways in which these issues have been approached, ranging from evolutionary mismatch theories to the Nutrition Transition, favoured by WHO, to the Foresight system model, developed by the government office for science. Following the publication of Foresight, the Labour Secretary of State for Health proclaimed that obesity represented the 'climate change' of public health, although under the new coalition government favoured remedies places the emphasis more on behaviour and voluntary effort, underpinning concepts being 'Nudge' and Responsibility Deals respectively. (And at the EU level with official support of private public partnerships to promote behaviour change, such as EPODE.) Building on the argument that all such remedies emerge within a context of 'policy cacophony' and a bias towards 'soft', short-term measures, I suggest that the ecological public health perspective overcomes the partiality of conventional public health perspectives and, by integrating a perspective on human health with that of ecosystem health, makes the case that obesity should be understood within the context of social and planetary sustainability.
