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Dear Fellow Vermonter,
In Vermont and across America today, we have a type-2 diabetes epidemic and we have an obesity epidemic. They are directly related and both epidemics are getting worse.
The statistics are staggering: More than 55,000 Vermonters have been diagnosed with diabetes and one out of four Vermonters do not yet know that they have diabetes. As overweight Vermont children reach adulthood, diabetes rates are expected to increase substantially. Nearly 35 percent of the adult population in Vermont have prediabetes with blood glucose levels that are higher than normal but not yet high enough to be diagnosed as diabetes. This is an issue we have got to address it.
Let's be clear. This epidemic is not only endangering the health and wellbeing of thousands of Vermonters and tens of millions of Americans, it is also enormously expensive. According to the American Diabetes Association, the total estimated cost of diabetes in the U.S. was nearly $413 billion last year. In Vermont, diagnosed diabetes costs an estimated $520 million each year.
The questions that must be asked are: Why is the number of children in America today who have type-2 diabetes estimated to skyrocket by nearly 700% over the next 40 years? How did it happen that the rate of childhood obesity in America has tripled since the 1970s and has gotten so bad that one out of every five kids in America and over 40 percent of adults today are now obese?
The answers to these questions are not complicated.
For decades, we have allowed large corporations to entice children to eat foods and beverages loaded up with sugar, salt and saturated fat deliberately designed to be overeaten.
The situation has gotten so bad that most of what kids in America eat today consist of unhealthy, ultra-processed foods like sweetened breakfast cereals, sugary soft drinks, chicken tenders, hotdogs, French fries, frozen pizzas, and chips that experts have told us lead to a higher risk of type-2 diabetes. Even food that appears to be healthy like fruit-flavored yogurts and granola bars contain high-levels of added sugar.
Alarmingly, according to a recent study published in the British Medical Journal, ultra-processed foods, which make up an incredible 73 percent of our nation’s food supply, can be as addictive as alcohol and nearly as addictive as cigarettes.
While the diabetes and obesity rates in America soar, while we spend hundreds of billions of dollars to treat diabetes, the food and beverage industry spent $14 billion last year on advertising to make many of their unhealthy products irresistible to the American consumer. Even worse, $2 billion of this money is used to directly market food predominantly high in sugar, salt and saturated fat to our children in order to get them hooked on these products at an early age.
According to the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, children and teens view about 4,000 food and beverage ads on television each year, an average of ten advertisements each day. Another study found that children who watch Nickelodeon and Nicktoons are exposed to over ten unhealthy food and beverage ads every hour.
Last year, for example, Coca-Cola spent $327 million on advertising in the United States alone while it raked in over $9.5 billion in profits. Not one of their ads will tell you that drinking one or two cans of Coke a day will increase your chances of getting type-2 diabetes by 26 percent. Nor will their tv ads tell you that one 20-ounce bottle of Coke contains over 15 teaspoons of sugar – more than twice the recommended daily limit for kids under the age of 18.
The time is long overdue for us to seriously combat the type-2 diabetes and obesity epidemic in America. We must have the courage to take on the greed of the food and beverage industry which, every day, is attacking the health and well-being of our children. And a good place to start would be to ban junk food ads targeted to kids. This is not a radical idea.
The National Institutes of Health has estimated that if the US banned fast-food advertising marketed to children, we could cut the childhood obesity rate in our country by up to 18 percent.
In the 1980s, Quebec banned junk food advertising to children. Today, Quebec has the lowest childhood obesity rate in Canada and the highest consumption of fruits and vegetables of any province in their nation.
The food and beverage industry will no doubt do everything they can to protect the status quo and their ability to destroy the health of our kids. It’s not only billions in TV advertising. During the last presidential election cycle they spent a record-breaking $42.5 million on campaign contributions to elect candidates who will protect their interests.
Enough is enough. This week, as Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, I held a hearing to discuss many of the issues outlined above. If you missed it, click here to watch.
It’s time we stood up against an industry that puts profits ahead of the health of our children. It’s time that we do all that we can to combat the diabetes epidemic in our state and across our country.
Sincerely,
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