Less puff, more huff as quitters pile on kilos
Still got the habit: Laverton trainee hairdressers (from left) Tyla Collier, 15, Stephanie Sales and Jacilyn MacDonald, both 16, in Melbourne's King Street yesterday.
Photo: Craig Sillitoe
Paul Heinrichs
October 22, 2006
AUSTRALIA is giving up smoking — only to become obese.
The nation is substituting one deadly habit for another — prompting the question of whether there is a link.
The national president of Diabetes Australia, Professor Peter Little, said: "I think it's an extremely good observation. The question is reasonable."
Diabetes Australia's obesity report, completed by Access Economics and released last week, estimated that obesity cost Australia $21 billion last year in direct spending, disability and premature death.
By 2025, it predicted that up to 7.2 million Australians, or 28.9 per cent of the population, could be obese.
In particular, the problem of obesity peaks for people in the 55-59 age group, who appear to have become especially susceptible to triggers of obesity, including lack of exercise and bad eating.
Coincidentally or otherwise, many of these people gave up smoking in the past two decades under pressure of public health campaigns.
Health authorities are alarmed that the gains made in cardiovascular health since about 1990 — by reduced smoking rates and better treatment of blood pressure — will be severely eroded by obesity.
Just how much of a link there is between giving up smoking and increasing obesity in Australia is not clear — although the existence of a link appears indisputable.
Research quoted on the Quit website show that women who give up smoking tend to put on an average of between three and 5.5 kilograms.
Anecdotally, this is one of the main barriers to giving up, as cited by women (especially young women) who smoke.
Three young trainee hairdressers from Laverton made the point while lighting up outside the Victoria University of Technology's King Street campus. "I guess if you're not smoking and you get bored, you eat," said Jacilyn MacDonald, 16, who smokes nearly a packet a day. "You have to have a craving for something."
"A lot of people tell me to give up, but I'm scared I'm going to put on lots of weight," said her friend, Stephanie Sales, 16. "Whenever you get hungry, you just have a smoke and it's gone."
Tyla Collier, 15, said: "I don't smoke to get skinny, I smoke because I want to smoke, but I guess that if I did quit, I'd put on weight. That's what happened to my dad when he quit … he quit cold turkey and then ate to stop the cravings."
Anti-smoking researchers say a person would have to put on 40 kilograms to incur the same ill-health effects as smoking.
Figures from the Cancer Council of Victoria, however, show the anti-smoking message has mostly been getting through to the young.
Over the past 20 years, the percentage of 16 to 17-year-olds in secondary school who smoke has dropped from 34 to 20 per cent for girls and 30 to 18 per cent for boys.
Obesity researcher Professor Boyd Swinburne cautioned against drawing too much from the graph in terms of linkage.
He said he had done a research project in New Zealand about 10 years ago which showed that only about 8 per cent of the population's increasing weight was attributable to the quitting smoking. He suspected it would be the same in Australia.
"For me, the two most important things are that the quit-smoking rate is a very minor contributor to the rise in obesity," he said.
"The second is that when you quit, you get substantial health gains, and the couple of kilograms of weight that goes on is nowhere near the health risk of smoking."
Professor Swinburne said the bubble of obesity among the middle-aged could be explained by the fact that they had a higher propensity to be obese, independent of quitting smoking.
The chief executive officer of VicHealth, Rob Moodie, said it was important not to divert the public health message about the importance of quitting smoking — adding that people who are smoking and getting obese simultaneously increase their circulatory disease mortality risk by 11 times.
"Would we have had the obesity epidemic without the quitting-tobacco effect — absolutely yes … because of all the other drivers.
"The quitting and tobacco decline has come at a time when all these other things are happening as well.
"There is a huge decline in activity, a huge rise in inactive transport, a huge rise in inactive leisure, an increasing capacity to produce calories in ways that can be rammed down our throats as fast-food advertising to children."
But he acknowledges that people may be in a transition from smoking to overeating.
"We don't have that necessary information about how to bring people off smokes and food at the same time," he says.
QUITTING THE SMOKES
- Think carefully about why you want to quit.
- Make a plan, which will involve knowing why you smoke, planning ways to deal with quitting and setting a date to quit.
- Stay on track. Read and share stories or tips, and learn to enjoy and value your new smoke-free lifestyle and starting to think of yourself as a non-smoker. It's normal to get cravings — resist them.
SOURCE: www.quit.org.au
See your doctor first if you are taking medication. If you are depressed or suffering mental illness, ask your doctor's advice.
The Age
but it sounds like an excuse.
