Current Lecture

Monday, November 11, 2024, 6:00pm

“Personal responsibility” or public health?

Our Speaker

Robert H. Lustig, M.D., M.S.L. is Emeritus Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, and Member of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at UCSF. Dr. Lustig is a neuroendocrinologist, with expertise in obesity, diabetes, metabolism, and nutrition. He is one of the leaders of the current “anti-sugar” movement that is changing the food industry. He has dedicated his retirement from clinical medicine to help to fix the food supply any way he can, to reduce human suffering and to salvage the environment, by interacting with all stakeholders to bring them together around a common vision of metabolic health: protect the liver, feed the gut, support the brain. Dr. Lustig graduated from MIT in 1976, and received his M.D. from Cornell University Medical College in 1980. He also received his Masters of Studies in Law (MSL) degree at University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 2013. He is the author of the popular books Fat Chance (2012), The Hacking of the American Mind (2017), and Metabolical (2021). He is the Chief Science Officer of the non-profit Eat REAL, and is a member of the Nutrition Task Force of the American Dental Association.

Synopsis

“Personal responsibility” is an ideology, championed as the solution for all our societal ills. Blame the individual’s behavior. The problem is that every personal responsibility issue eventually morphs into a public health crisis. Lead poisoning, vitamin deficiencies, TB, asthma, were all initially blamed on personal responsibility, but science made it clear that each of these were really exposures. More perniciously, teen pregnancy, smoking, and HIV were also attributed to personal responsibility. How about guns? And now, of course, the obesity epidemic falls under the same rubric. Diet and exercise, gluttony and sloth, “it’s your fault” — individuals exercise free choice as to what they put in their mouths. But what if you don’t have a choice? What if society cannot afford the health consequences of the Industrial Global Diet? What if the food has been formulated to be both toxic and addictive? “Personal responsibility” is an ideology that denies biology, and public health crises cannot be resolved one person at a time.

Learning Objectives

1. Examine the role of personal responsibility in public health crises.

2. Discern between the energy balance model and energy storage model of obesity.

3. Examine the “obesogen model” of weight gain and disease.

4. Examine the behavior of the food industry as the obesity crisis worsened.

5. Discuss the role of GLP-1 analogs in mitigating the current obesity and diabetes pandemics.