Governments must take urgent action to prevent noncommunicable diseases from becoming an uncontrollable epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. Sugar-sweetened beverage taxation offers a potential solution.
Appropriately designed taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages would result in proportional reductions in consumption.
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Lifestyle medicine targets the root of chronic diseases like obesity, heart disease and diabetes. Experts explain why everyone should embrace these free prescriptions for good health.
Salty and fatty foods are driving up obesity.
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Better technology to diagnose, treat and manage the disease early enough is needed to improve the survival rates of childhood cancer in sub Saharan Africa.
Tilahun Haregu, African Population and Health Research Center and Peninah Masibo, African Population and Health Research Center
So-called lifestyle diseases such as cancer and heart disease have been rising in Africa, adding to the already huge burden of disease in poor countries. But the research has not kept pace.
In many rural areas, poor people are suffering from malnutrition, which takes the form of stunting and obesity. To change this, their food environments must change.
Smoking, excessive drinking, not exercising or eating unhealthy foods leads to lifestyle diseases.
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Doctors in South Africa have not been doing enough counselling of people who drink, smoke, don’t exercise and eat badly on ways to change their lifestyles.
South Africans need to reduce the number of sugar-sweetened beverages they consume.
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With one can of cool drink containing six teaspoons of sugar – your recommended sugar intake for the day – there is a need to reduce the number of sugar-sweetened beverages South Africans consume.
A global health and disease study shows we’re living longer, but spending more years in poor health. But there are some things within our power to change.
Older people are more likely to drop out of the workforce for good when they’re sick than young people.
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Economic modelling shows that policies to reduce chronic diseases can have large economic benefits –A$4.5 billion a year for diabetes alone – by reducing health costs and boosting the workforce.
Watching television for an average of six hours a day could shorten life expectancy by almost five years, according to a study we published today in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. What’s more…
Professor and Programme Director, SA MRC Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science - PRICELESS SA (Priority Cost Effective Lessons in Systems Strengthening South Africa), University of the Witwatersrand
Senior Researcher, SA MRC Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science, PRICELESS SA, Faculty of Health Sciences, Wits School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand