BIOGRAPHY Robyn Toomath is the Clinical Director of general
medicine at Auckland Hospital. She trained as an endocrinologist and while
president of the NZ Society for the Study of Diabetes determined that she
needed to divert her energies from treating diabetes to preventing obesity.
She co- founded the activist group FOE (Fight the Obesity Epidemic) in
2001 and her book “Fat Science” was published by Auckland University Press in
2016. She is the New Zealand president of IMSANZ. ABSTRACT
The Macro-Economic Determinants of Body Size. Whether we are fat or thin is all a matter of energy in, energy out. We all (well, mostly) want to be thin, so why aren’t we? Food is more than fuel it’s also a source of pleasure so it’s hard to resist delicious food when it’s put in front of us. But what determines what’s put in front of us? And how much it costs? It’s partly the way we shop and how much money we have to spend but the big determinants have nothing to do with personal choice. We respond to our food environment which is the product of agricultural and trade policies. If we want a slimmer population we need to look upstream at the real influencers of nutrition, and think about how we might change these for the good.
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