Supporting Volunteers in Their Personal War on Obesity with Reliable Information from Widely Available Health Science Journals

Obesity has made headline news throughout 2003 and there are no signs that interest in this topic will abate any time soon. A quick search on the index term "obesity" in the Factiva database on November 17, 2003 retrieved 426 hits when limiting results to the past three months. The severity of the growing problem of obesity has been highlighted by recent pronouncements from the nation's leading health authorities. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control, recently named obesity "the number-one health problem facing the [United States.]" (1) Within days of this announcement, Richard H. Carmona, the U.S. Surgeon General, requested help from pediatricians to curb the marked rise of childhood obesity and, at the same time, introduced "Shaping America's Youth," a new anti-obesity Web site for physicians, teachers, parents, and others looking for strategies to combat childhood obesity. (2) These two developments may have triggered recently proposed federal legislation that, if passed, would require U.S. restaurant chains to label each menu item with nutritional content information. (3) How many Americans need to lose thirty or more pounds? It has been estimated that 31 percent of Americans are obese (when obesity is defined as weighing thirty or more pounds over one's ideal weight), and that this figure will escalate to 40 percent by 2010. (4) However, even more alarming is the dramatic increase in the number of Americans who are very obese, defined as being more than one hundred pounds overweight. This statistic increased four-fold between 1986 and 2000, with the number of clinically obese Americans now approaching one in five adults. (5) Even our pets are pudgy. The National Academy of Sciences recently reported that one-fourth of cats and dogs in the Western world are overweight. (6) The impetus for this column came fifteen months ago when Tony Stankus informed me that he was launching a weight-loss program with the goal of losing 150 pounds. Tony's transformation has been truly amazing. He lost 150 pounds in only fifteen months and has managed to keep these pounds off. Readers can view the dramatic results by looking at these "before" and "after" photographs posted at the following URL: www.holycross.edu/departments/library/website/transformedtony.html. The only thing weighty now about Tony is his vita. He is one of the country's preeminent science librarians, having served as science librarian at the College of the Holy Cross for three decades. In addition to serving as the previous editor of "The Alert Collector" column, he has authored or coauthored ten books and more than one hundred articles. He is best known for his scholarship relating to serials publishing, publishing trends in the sciences, liaison librarianship, and other topics relating to collection development. He is a frequent contributor to Science and Technology Libraries and serves as the editor of the "Making Sense of Serials" column in Technicalities.--Editor ********** There have been few, if any, articles in our own literature dealing with the provision of reliable material to overweight library users seeking to change their situation. Why might this be so? It cannot be because the reading public is uninterested in weight loss. There have been 2,036 new weight-loss books published in English in the last ten years, according to WorldCat. Over the last two years, People magazine alone has featured four cover stories on weight loss: TV's Today Show weatherman Al Roker (November 18, 2002); 1980s pop-star Carnie Wilson (January 15, 2001); TV interviewer and sometime talk-show host Bryant Gumbel (July 28, 2003); and, most inspirationally, the January 13, 2003, cover, which featured eight ordinary people who had each lost half their body weight in excess fat, for a collective total of 1,027 pounds, with genuinely insightful coverage inside. It cannot be because Americans are uninterested in obesity's association with many of the illnesses to which they, or members of their family, may one day be vulnerable. …