THE statistics tell a story of a divided city – where geography can determine your waistline.
The NSW Ministry of Health’s new Health Statistics website reveals residents of Sydney’s west and south-west are far more likely to be overweight than their wealthier counterparts in the city centre or the north.
The proportion of women from northern Sydney who are overweight or obese is 38.8 per cent, compared with 50.4 per cent in the Nepean Blue Mountains area, for example.
Local government areas that have ”significantly higher” hospital admissions than the state average – owing to obesity – include Bankstown, Wollongong, Campbelltown, Wyong, Liverpool Plains and Queanbeyan, according to the website.
The socio-economic obesity divide has some experts arguing for a tax on junk food to subsidise healthier nutritional choices.
Poorer families are more susceptible to obesity because it costs less to eat processed food than fresh food, according to Professor Kerin O’Dea, the director of the Sansom Institute for Health Research at the University of South Australia.
“The economics of food choice is a major factor in obesity levels,” Ms O’Dea said. “There is no question that heavily processed foods rich in sugar, fat [and] salt are cheaper in calories per dollar. The most expensive foods are the ones recommended that people should eat, like lean meat compared to fatty meat in sausages etc.”
A University of Sydney study of 8500 children in 2007 found that 9 per cent of children from low socio-economic groups were obese, compared with 4 per cent of children from high-income families.
Governments around the world are starting to tax unhealthy foods in a bid to curb the obesity epidemic: Denmark recently introduced a tax on saturated fats, Hungary has a hamburger tax and France has a soft-drink tax. The US is considering taxing soft drinks.
The Deakin University research fellow Gary Sacks supports levying foods high in sugar, salt and fat, saying a 20 per cent tax on a can of soft drink would be a sufficient deterrent.
“The two main things that drive what people buy is taste and price,” Mr Sacks said. “We can play around with price, it’s definitely a lever we can pull … you tax the bad stuff and ideally subsidise fruit and veg.”
Mr Sacks’s research has shown a junk-food tax could reduce the average weight of the population by half a kilo, in turn saving taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in reduced costs to the health system.
A spokesman for the government says it is “not currently considering” any tax on junk food or drink. Cosima Marriner, Rachel Browne Sydney Morning Herald