About Obesity

So why has obesity become so much more prevalent in the last 20 or 30 years? I think the answer to this stems all the way back to the 1980s, when the FDA encouraged people to eat less saturated fat and people naturally started to eat more grains, refined carbohydrates. And we know that refined carbohydrates and sugar block the weight-regulating hormone leptin that normally keeps us slim and causes parts of the population to really suffer with obesity. And I think the fact that we’ve moved onto a diet quite high in carbohydrates has directly caused obesity.

I’m Pieter Gouffacombe, I’m the Deputy General Administrator of the National Institute for Health and Disability Insurance in Belgium. The big challenge we have at policy level with obesity is that we know the figures, so we know that we already have a significant number of people dealing with overweight and obesity and we know that this will grow, so we should prepare to have better care, but also to have better prevention and to also look at overweight and obesity not only as a problem of the care system, but of society as a whole. The big problem we face is that obesity is still a little bit looked at as a sort of responsibility of the person and you’re blamed for being overweight or having obesity and we know from evidence that in fact it’s a complex interplay of a lot of different factors, genetic factors, hormonal factors, also social factors and of course also behavior of persons that can cause overweight and obesity and if you really want to tackle the obesity challenge in a fundamental way, then we need to acknowledge that this won’t be by only blaming the victim.
Well, science is one part of the solution of course. The whole discussion we have for the moment on the medicines that could help control overweight and obesity and as a payer, the National Institute is a payer in health insurance, we are looking forward to the discussions we will have on the value, but also on the price of these products, so we see that innovation and scientific new insights of course will come up with new solutions. That said, we should also take into account that part of the solution is also in the organization of the care system, for example the collaboration between the primary care, also the more specialized care in hospitals and even tertiary care, so we should in fact capitalize on the new insights that science brings, but we should also work on the organization of our care system.
From a Belgian perspective and knowing what our strengths and our weaknesses are, my big dream would be that the next governments, and we will have elections for the national, regional and local governments during this year, that these governments would really set an ambitious objective with regard to healthy lifestyle and obviously healthy food, healthy eating, also sports etc. and tackling in a preventive way also overweight and obesity would be clearly one target in that, but we should in some way find a partnership between governments, between non-profit organizations, between patients and citizens, also with industry to really come together and fight the challenges we have with regard to overweight and obesity.