By Crystal D. Swann
October 18, 2004

In 2002, Congress charged the Institutes of Medicine with developing an action plan to decrease the number of obese children and youth in the United States. The report, released September 30, entitled Preventing Childhood Obesity: Health in the Balance, concluded that childhood obesity is a serious nationwide health problem requiring urgent attention; preventing obesity involves promoting healthful eating behaviors and regular physical activity — with the goal of achieving and maintaining energy balance at a healthy weight; and individual efforts and societal changes are needed concurrently.

Among its recommendations, the report calls on states and local communities to plan more sidewalks, bike paths, playgrounds and other recreational facilities; expand and promote opportunities for physical activity in the community through changes in ordinances, capital improvement programs, and other planning practices and work with communities to support partnerships and networks that expand the availability of and access to healthful foods.

According to recent studies by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's (RWJ) Active Living by Community Design project, "a major impediment to the success is that the environments in which people live do not support physical activity. Increasingly, we are dependent on automobile transportation and have fewer opportunities to engage in physical activity. Lack of open spaces, safe walkways and bicycle paths, inconvenient location of common destinations such as home, work, school and stores, decline of school-based physical education, reliance on leisure time for engaging in physical activity and prevalence of mechanized devices all contribute to a lack of exercise."

The Conference of Mayors has joined with both RWJ Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to launch the Mayors' Healthy Cities Initiative. The initiative will collect information on what cities are doing nationwide to address the epidemic of obesity and encourage healthy lifestyles. In addition to a sign up campaign, the Conference will provide the Mayors with information to address this issue in an effort to reduce the impact of obesity and inactivity on their citizens and city budgets. Obesity-associated annual hospital costs for children and youth more than tripled over two decades, rising from $35 million in 1979-1981 to $127 million in 1997-1999. The national healthcare expenditures related to obesity and overweight in adults alone range from $98 million to $129 million annually.

For more information the Institutes of Medicine or Robert Wood Johnson Foundation projects website at www.iom.edu or www.rwjf.org.