Are Our Kids Living Sicker and Dying Younger? | Big Think

Are Our Kids Living Sicker and Dying Younger?

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Why we may be first generation in modern history to raise offspring less healthy than ourselves.

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Risa Lavizzo-Mourey:

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, M.D., M.B.A., is the fourth president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a position she assumed in January 2003. She originally joined the staff in April 2001 as the senior vice president and director, Health Care Group. Prior to coming to the Foundation, Lavizzo-Mourey was the Sylvan Eisman Professor of Medicine and Health Care Systems at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as director of the Institute on Aging. She was the deputy administrator of the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research now known as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality within the Department of Health and Human Services. While in government service, Lavizzo-Mourey worked on the White House Health Care Policy team, including the White House Task Force on Health Care Reform where she co-chaired the working group on Quality of Care. Lavizzo-Mourey has served on many federal advisory committees, including the Task Force on Aging Research; the National Committee for Vital and Health Statistics, where she chaired the Subcommittee on Minority Populations; and the President's Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry. She recently completed work as co-director of a congressionally requested Institute of Medicine study on racial disparities in health care resulting in the publication of Unequal Treatment, Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. She is the author of scores of articles and several books. Lavizzo-Mourey is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. She is the recipient of eight honorary doctorates and numerous other awards, including those received from the Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Health and Human Services, The National Academy of Sciences, American College of Physicians, National Library of Medicine, American Medical Women’s Association, National Medical Association and University of Pennsylvania. Lavizzo-Mourey earned a medical degree at Harvard Medical School, followed by a master of business administration at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. After completing a residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received her geriatrics training.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey: A few years ago, we [at the Wood Johnson Foundation] recognized that all of the data was pointing us to a very frightening reality. We may be raising the first generation of kids who live sicker and die younger than their parents.rn

That caused us to develop a strategy and a goal to reduce the epidemic of childhood obesity by 2015, not only to reduce it, to reverse it by 2015. As we’ve done this work, we have really tried to bring in all of the different sectors--the business sector, food industry, the activity sectors, schools, government, businesses and how we work and create environments for employees, because it is going to take a movement that involves all of those sectors if we’re going to reverse this epidemic of childhood obesity.