New data showing that fewer young people are smoking offered some refreshingly good news yesterday. Thanks to years of hard work by different organisations, each tackling different aspects of the issue, we are seeing some real progress.
The value of long term investment in social marketing and education, combined with a range of regulatory changes over many years, has surely been proven. It also highlights the many challenges inherent in motivating behaviour change.
A consistent increase in price to the point where smoking has become unaffordable is part of the story but isn’t the only factor. We’ve also seen wider cultural and societal shifts along with a better understanding of health protection and promotion.
Another success factor is the ability to use single-minded messages like smoke-free, quit, stop and cut it out. Interestingly, some of these messages are negative. This is something often deemed inappropriate but in this case seems to have done the job, showing yet again that we can’t apply a ‘cookie cutter’ approach to these things. The messages also left no room for confusion through use of words like moderation, balance and variety.
While this single-minded approach has been a common success factor in addressing some issues there are actually very few situations where a ‘silver bullet’ solution can be found.
Unintended consequences can arise from taking a single message too far. Adherence to the skin cancer prevention slip, slop slap message has potentially resulted in substandard Vitamin D status for some, which could lead to poor bone health, diabetes and heart disease.
It is at this point that for me the good news around smoking could take a bad turn. I can once again see this great success story being misrepresented and cited as a blueprint for reducing population obesity levels. Demonising one food or even one food company on the basis of the anti-tobacco lobby’s success would be misleading and show a lack of understanding of consumers as individuals.
Such an approach fails to take into account the complex social, cultural, psychological and (let’s not forget) life-giving attributes of food. You can’t put these things in a patch and stick them on your arm. Single minded messages might sometimes be useful but their interpretation depends on the perspective of each individual.
If we want to shift our energy balance in the right direction we need to focus on burning the excess fat stored in bodies than vilifying individual food products. It is never going to be a precise process that ‘fixes’ a problem. It has taken anti-smoking groups decades to reach this point and their work continues. Here’s hoping we take the appropriate lessons from this good news.
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The movie Food Inc will be screened soon in New Zealand. It’s likely to excite a few, exasperate others, and cause many more to think about the future of our food, where it comes from and what the future holds, especially the growing number among us who have little or no idea about where our food comes from.