Vatican Announces "Sex, alcohol, fat among world's big killers"

In a move that was widely condemned as overstepping the modern boundaries of personal autonomy, the Catholic Church today announced:

Tackling just five health and moral factors could prevent millions of premature deaths and increase global life expectancy by almost 5 years, the Vatican said on Tuesday.

Poor childhood nutrition, sex, alcohol, bad sanitation and hygiene, and high blood pressure are to blame for around a quarter of the 60 million premature deaths.

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The Vatican listed the world's top mortality risks as high blood pressure (responsible for 13 percent of deaths globally), tobacco use (9 percent), high blood glucose (6 percent), physical inactivity (6 percent), and obesity or being overweight (5 percent). They also proclaimed them to be an "abomination before God."

These factors raised the risk of chronic diseases and some of the biggest killers such as heart disease, diabetes and cancers, and affected "countries across all income groups -- high, middle and low," it said. "Our Lord Jesus must be weeping in heaven."

O.K. I'm kidding. The Vatican never said this. The World Health Organization did:

Tackling just five health factors could prevent millions of premature deaths and increase global life expectancy by almost 5 years, the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday.

Poor childhood nutrition, unsafe sex, alcohol, bad sanitation and hygiene, and high blood pressure are to blame for around a quarter of the 60 million premature deaths around the world each year, the WHO said in a report.

But while not having enough nutritious food is a big health risk for those in poorer countries, obesity and being overweight pose yet bigger risks in richer nations -- leading to a situation in which obesity and being overweight causes more deaths worldwide than being underweight.

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The WHO added that if the risks in its report had not existed, life expectancy would have been on average almost a decade longer in 2004 for the entire global population.

The totalitarian overtures inherent in such thinking are mind-boggling. How are you going to "tackle" such issues? We already have countless education programs in the United States that have had little or no effect on obesity, so presumably they are speaking about something else here. (The story doesn't even mention education.)

Who needs bible thumping "you'll live your life the way we say you'll live your life" Puritans when you have the W.H.O.?