A new Northern Health position paper on obesity is getting high praise from an expert in the field.
Dr. Arya Sharma, a professor of medicine at the University of Alberta, can't say enough good things about the paper released earlier this year.
"There's a number of novel aspects which I think are quite unique to this position paper which you normally don't find in other public health documents," Sharma said.
Sharma said health authorities are often resistant to change and fall victim to "group think", but he said Northern Health was willing to take a chance by getting away from the concept of healthy weight and adopting the idea that people can be healthy at any size.
"This is the fastest I think I've ever seen emerging research find its way into a policy document," Sharma said, noting some of the ideas in the paper come from research published in academic journals less than a year ago.
Northern Health chief medical health officer Dr. Ronald Chapman is grateful for the support and said it's encouraging for everyone who worked on the paper.
"I must say I quite enjoyed his comments and it's nice to get that kind of acknowledgment," he said.
Sharma is an advocate of obesity management rather than weight management. Too much of an emphasis on weight can cause stress for patients and lead to body image issues. By focussing on promoting healthy lifestyles, Sharma said Northern Health made a big leap forward.
"In reality you can't measure your health by simply stepping on a scale," he said. "Your weight, at best, tells you whether you're at risk for something, it doesn't say if you actually have it."
Chapman said Northern Health decided to change its focus because the old model simply wasn't working. Despite efforts to get people to lose weight, he said obesity rates kept on rising. By looking at ways to promote health at every weight, Chapman is hopeful it will reduce chronic illnesses and heart conditions.
When researching the position paper, Chapman said Northern Health found evidence that focusing on weight can not only be ineffective, it can also be dangerous. Sometimes people who try to hit a target weight, end up yo-yoing as they go on and off diets which can put internal stress on their bodies. In other instances, the diets themselves can lead to poor health outcomes.
"Some diets in the long term do more harm than good," Chapman said, pointing to low-carb diets causing increased cholesterol and higher rates of heart attacks. "These diets aren't as innocent as we make them out to be and secondly they simply do not work."
On his blog at www.drsharma.ca, Sharma wrote that Northern Health's paper could be used as a starting point for other health authorities.
"Moving well beyond the populistic, but simplistic, stereotype-promoting focus on shaming, blaming, banning, taxing and other 'negative' responses to the obesity epidemic, this document takes an almost post-modern position on obesity prevention and control that could (and probably should) serve as a Northern 'light' to other agencies," he wrote.
As much as Sharma enjoyed the position paper, he said the challenge Northern Health now faces is finding ways to implement the policy. Chapman said an action plan is in the works.
"What we need to start looking at is how do we make at lot of these things a reality," Chapman said. "We don't have the answer for it at the moment. . . . I think to be realistic this is going to require time to change knowledge, behaviour and actions."
