The large, windowless and wood-panelled room has long since lost its lustre. But this week this unremarkable location in the heart of Geneva will play host to 32 officials and diplomats who will gather to make a decision which could reverberate across the globe.
They will decide whether or not the world should have a plan for tackling its greatest health hazard -- obesity.
All eyes will be on William Steiger, a youthful Yale graduate who is also the godson of George Bush senior. Steiger is special assistant to the US Health Secretary Tommy Thompson and a rising star of the Bush administration. At the executive board meeting of the World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday, he will attempt to pull apart the world's only realistic attempt so far to help poorer nations avert the looming public health disaster threatened by the growing burden of heart disease and diabetes.
The target of Steiger's attack will be the WHO's roadmap for action, known as the Global Strategy on Diet, Nutrition and Physical Activity. In a fiercely controversial 30-page document which came to light last week, Steiger, on behalf of the George W. Bush administration, argues that there is little robust scientific data on which to base its broad range of suggestions on how to prevent obesity. And if America has its way, then the goals of the past 18 months, involving an effort by many hundreds of public health experts and doctors worldwide to come up with workable initiatives, will slip further out of reach.
Britain, in the form of its chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson, is fighting to keep the policy alive along with other countries, but the Americans -- and more particularly, their food lobbyists -- have used different tactics to undermine anything that would affect their lucrative food industry. The sugar barons who pour so much into the presidential coffers before elections have hired lobbyists and used senators to threaten to pull funding away from the WHO.
In April last year the WHO, along with the Food and Agriculture Organization, published a report spelling out the dangers of sugar, fat and salt. The combination of sedentary lifestyles and processed food, experts warned, meant that countries such as Brazil and India were soaring up the obesity league.
The developing regions, even more than the western world, are at risk from junk food because their populations carry more of the "thrifty genes," the DNA which predisposes people to putting on weight quickly after centuries of living through periods of starvation and then periods of plenty. The scientific report, which was put together by 36 of the world's leading nutrition and activity experts, warned that by 2025, India would have one of the highest rates of Type 2 diabetes.
The report, which became known by its technical number, 916, looked at the strength of evidence on how to prevent and control the major diet-related diseases, including diabetes, obesity, some cancers, cardiovascular and dental disease. But the clause that created most angst was the one suggesting that only 10 percent of average energy intake for an adult should come from added sugar.
As Ellen Ruppel Shell points out in her groundbreaking book Fat Wars, the average American consumes 34 teaspoons of sugar a day in their diet, a 30 percent increase from just 15 years ago. The annual consumption of sweeteners -- not just the sugar but the high-fructose, corn syrup, dextrose and glucose -- has leapt by 14.5kg since 1970, mostly because of soft drinks. In a 355ml can of a fizzy drink there will be about ten teaspoons of sweetener.
RSS