Health experts are sceptical that a citizens’ jury on obesity being held by the Victorian government’s health promotion arm, VicHealth, will do anything meaningful to address expanding waistlines.
On Thursday, VicHealth announced that 100 community members would be recruited at random to form a “jury” and, over a six-week period, would read through expert advice and evidence on obesity.
This would culminate in a two-day debate in October where the jury would come up with a series of recommendations to help Victorians eat better, which would be presented to a steering committee made up of health experts as well as representatives from the food and beverage industries.
A dietitian and senior lecturer with Monash University’s faculty of medicine, Dr Claire Palermo, said she found the proposal “frustrating”.
“That’s my immediate reaction, because it seems we are reinventing the wheel again when we already know what needs to be done. It’s just that what needs to be done has economic impacts, and is not politically sexy.”
The federal, state and territory governments needed to impose tougher regulations on food manufacturers to make it easier for people to identify healthy foods, Palermo said, and to make unhealthy foods less accessible through price increases and removing them from school canteens.
“We can change people’s purchasing habits through measures that won’t be popular with the food industry,” she said.
Palermo said it was disappointing funding was available for the jury while the Healthy Together Victoria initiative had not been given further funding in the most recent state and federal budgets.
That program worked with childcare centres, schools, workplaces, food outlets, sporting clubs, businesses, local governments and health professionals to make the places accessed by people every day more conductive to a healthy lifestyle.
“Victoria was well on the way to leading the world with that program and it’s disappointing that after some promising results, it has not receive ongoing funding,” she said.
The citizens’ jury will cost about $370,000, which includes the commissioning of original research, international evidence reviews, research design and implementation, the publishing of a final report in 2016 and a $250 stipend for participants.
The CEO of VicHealth, Jerril Rechter, said given juries in courts were trusted to make decisions about the law, it made sense to trust “everyday Victorians” to make decisions about issues that affected their health.
With nearly two-thirds of Australian adults and a quarter of children aged two to 17 either overweight or obese, it was important for the community to be well informed, she said.
“What we do know about these citizens’ juries is that there’s strong evidence they help to shift public attitudes,” Rechter said.
“It’s important to have experts telling us what to do, but we really must focus on the hearts and minds of everyday Victorians to help them understand the complexity of obesity.”
She defended the invitation to industry representatives from the Australian Beverages Council, the Australian Food and Grocery Council and Coles to be a part of the steering group, which will respond to the jury’s recommendations.
Representatives from the Australian Medical Association, the Obesity Policy Coalition and the state health department would also be on the committee.
“Industry has to be part of the solution,” Rechter said.
Laureate Professor Alan Lopez, who is director of the Global Burden of Disease Group at Melbourne University, said “under no circumstances” should the advice or responses from the food and beverage industry be taken as impartial.
“These industries are designed to take money, not to promote public health, they’re the same as tobacco,” Lopez said.
“If the jury is coming up with recommendations and putting them to the industry, that’s important in terms of dialogue, but it is important to remember that dialogue is going to be extremely difficult because of the vested interests of the industry.”
Money should be spent by governments on regulation of those industries, he said.
“So on better labelling for example, that shows clearly and easily what foods are full of salt and sugar, those sorts of changes,” he said.
“Responding to obesity will require many different strategies that target living environments and the food industry, and we need to invest in these things to help understand what population level interventions will make the population thinner. We still don’t know the answer to this.”
Professor Tim Gill, the programs director for Sydney University’s Boden Institute of Obesity, said the benefit of the community jury coming up with the recommendations was that industry would not be able to argue that the measures would not have community support.
“However, it still doesn’t bypass the need for government leadership,” Gill said.
“At the end of the day if the recommendations from the citizens’ jury aren’t binding, it will be tough to overcome government and industry reluctance to do anything meaningful to address these issues.”
