Welcome
Harvey V.Fineberg
DR. FINEBERG: Good evening, and welcome to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and tonight’s Rosenthal lecture program. It is a pleasure to welcome all of you to this evening’s event. We have a tradition, now going back 16 years, of annual lectures funded by the Rosenthal Foundation. Richard and Hinda Rosenthal are great friends of the IOM. Richard Rosenthal had been very active in the President’s Circle of the National Academies until his passing some years ago. His widow, Hinda Rosenthal, continues to this day to be actively interested in the work and activity at the IOM.
This lecture series, named in Richard and Hinda’s honor, is part of the program and effort of the IOM to reach out to a little larger public to discuss issues of great moment and consequence in health and health care. We are very privileged this evening to be able to talk together with a marvelous panel on the subject of preventing childhood obesity. As I think all of you are aware, this topic was the subject of a report that was released by the IOM the end of September. It is a report that was the product of many months of work by a very active and energetic committee, chaired by the chair of our program this evening, Dr. Jeffrey Koplan, whom I will introduce in just a moment.
I want to acknowledge and thank Dr. Shirley Watkins and Dr. Shiriki Kumanyika, in addition to Dr. Koplan. Also with us this evening we have several members of our Food and Nutrition Board who oversaw the effort to create the report. Members of our Board on Health Promotion and Disease Prevention are also with
us tonight. We are very happy to have all of you with us this evening as well.
This project was made possible by a number of funders from both the government and the private sector. They include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion in the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Disease, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the NIH Division of Nutrition Research Coordination.
We also were very fortunate to garner support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Not only has the foundation played a part in the support of the project that led up to the report, but it has also undertaken with us an activity to promote the ideas generated by the report to solve the problem of childhood obesity in the United States and to work together to eliminate and reverse this epidemic.
The obesity epidemic hasn’t always existed, but it is an epidemic that has emerged so rapidly that it is stunning when you think about its impact in demographic terms. In the last 30 years in the United States, the prevalence of obesity has more than doubled in children aged 2 to 5 years; in adolescents, age 12 to 19 years, it has also doubled. In children aged 6 to 11 years, it has tripled. The frequency of the problem has increased in very dramatic terms. Defining the scope and nature of the problem, describing the multiple approaches necessary to solving it, particularly the importance of approaching the problem simultaneously as a community and population-based activity, was a hallmark of the work of the committee that Dr. Koplan chaired.
Dr. Koplan is an individual whose preparation for this work was as ideal as one could imagine. His own background in medicine and public health includes work in the United States and overseas on a whole range of disease and health promotion concerns. Dr. Koplan also served as the director of the CDC and Prevention from 1998 to 2002. In recent years, I have been especially privileged to be able to closely work with him because of his agreement to serve, and his election to, the council of the IOM. Because of his