Obesity and Economic Development in Vermont
Economic Development is about a confluence of opportunities. It is about 2+2 equaling 5 or even 7. It is about understanding our assets, our liabilities and our culture. It is about understanding the abstract interstitials between obvious opportunities. It is about things being greater than the sum of their parts.
Vermont has such an opportunity now. Things change. It will not always have this opportunity. Take three key assets:
1. Vermont’s national leadership position in healthcare policy, quality, research, access and delivery,
2. Vermont’s growing reputation for converting a dairy monoculture into world-class quality food production,
3. The persistent beauty of Vermont’s landscape and its attraction for visitors who love the outdoors and its hospitality infrastructure.
4. The vitality of our creative, academic and communications endeavors.
Add a sad, but burgeoning market opportunity….the over-marketing of non-nutritive junk food, a decline in healthy family-centered eating behaviors, the emergence of more serious eating disorders in the young, endemic obesity worldwide and the prevalent onset of Type II diabetes in more and more people and at lower and lower ages.
There is an urgent opportunity to combine four of Vermont’s strongest assets into an economic and social opportunity for Vermonters that addresses an emerging market condition.
What is needed is the investment and organizational architecture to combine these four assets into a new enterprise that addresses the disorder, nutrition & food quality, natural exercise, lifestyle change and the creation of consumer and educational information, media and curricula
Imagine a Trapp Family Lodge, Fletcher Allen, NECI, The Vermont Fresh Network, The Cheese Council, The VT Councils on the Arts and the Humanities, even one or more of the unique spiritual centers, combining resources to create a life-changing educational opportunity for people mired in bad eating habits, bad nutrition and diagnosed with adult-onset diabetes – a place where they might come to learn about disease management from cutting edge researchers and clinicians at Fletcher Allen; learn about slow food nutrition from professional nutritionists, NECI and Vermont farmers; learn how to exercise in the beauty of the great outdoors by simply going for a nature walk while identifying plant and bird species or going cross-country skiing. Imagine reducing causative stress factors while listening to Vermont musicians, watching dance, theater or just reading.
Imagine our creative and academic resources combining forces to create compelling consumer and educational audiovisual and print materials and curricula to help communities and classrooms across the country address this complex phenomenon in our culture. Imagine using our creative economy to generate intellectual capital, jobs and revenue.
We are where we were twenty years ago with tobacco. We reduced tobacco abuse among young adults through education and media campaigns spending $100’s of millions of dollars to do it. We are poised to do the same with obesity. Vermont could craft a sound program for life style change that could lead the nation and attract some of those dollars while creating jobs.
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