It's not often (once in a blue moon occurs more frequently) that the elected leader of a developed country stands up and asserts the importance of public health policy. Tony Blair, the UK Prime Minister, did just that on Wednesday. One focus of his speech was that unless the food industry agrees to restrictions in television advertising, especially those targeted to children, he will impose mandatory requirements. Blair pointed to the impact of poor lifestyle choices on the National Health Service as well as a cause for continuing social inequities.
"The truth is we all now pay a collective price for the failure to take shared responsibility."
"That doesn't mean you stop treating people on the NHS who smoke, or force people to do things that they don't choose in their lifestyle," he said.
"But it does mean that government has to play an active role in precisely the way the enabling state should work and that is empowering people, setting the conditions in which they can choose responsibly."
He argued that public health problems were "not, strictly speaking, public health problems at all".
"They are questions of individual lifestyle - obesity, smoking, alcohol abuse, diabetes, sexually transmitted disease," said Mr Blair.
"These are not epidemics in the epidemiological sense - they are the result of millions of individual decisions, at millions of points in time."
In other coverage of the speech -
Dr Fiona Adshead, the government's deputy Chief Medical Officer for England, said the drive was born out of a need to be realistic about how people live their lives.
"We have to understand how people live their lives. We can't approach it from the fantasy of how we would want them to.
"Some people will not always make the healthy choices.
"But I think if we can get the message across that a small change can make a big difference, and it is up to the individual to take responsibility for that, anything is achievable.
"What we can do is create the conditions for individuals to do that. Clear food labelling is one way this can be done, but we have to look to tailor approaches to individuals."
To do this, the government is embracing a technique called social marketing which attempts to use well-researched, subtle measures to get people to make healthy choices.
Now that's leadership with a plan. What's also interesting is how the path has been carved to include both the economic argument and address the "nanny state" rejoinders (Government intrusion in people's personal lives). Public health becomes a conservative cause? Now that would be a normative change!
Technorati Tags: Food Advertising, Public Health Policy, Social Marketing
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