[9/7/16] In a town hall meeting in Laos on Wednesday, President Barack Obama said that there are a set of health issues that have to do with “prosperity,” because “as people get wealthier, they’re starting to get fatter.”
“A second set of issues have to do with actually prosperity, and that is as people get wealthier, they’re starting to get fatter. They’re starting to get more diseases that are associated with modern life – lack of exercise, processed foods, and what’s been interesting is these are, a lot of these problems like diabetes used to be primarily in wealthier countries,” Obama said.
“Now you’re seeing them pop up in countries like Mexico that didn’t use to have these problems because of changing eating habits and lifestyles. So those are a second set of issues. Again, these are all preventable,” he said.
Obama was responding to a question on what his views were “on the future of global health, especially on non-communicable diseases such as cancer and diabetes.”
“In terms of global health, I think that there are different stages. In developing countries, there’s just a lot of things that we know how to do. We just have to do them,” he said.
Obama said there are “diseases that are the result of poor nutrition, not enough to eat, no clean drinking water, sanitation systems that are not ideal, basic preventive care that can be provided in clinics and don’t require big technologies, preventing malaria, which just mosquito nets and effective mosquito abatement can make a difference.”
“So there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, things that we can do that can save so many lives,” he said, noting for example maternal health “because we still have too much infant mortality in women who are dying in childbirth…CONTINUE READING