People in the News | Improving the treatment of obesity - and of peopleBy Thomas J. Brady
Inquirer Staff Writer
Twenty-five years of doing obesity research has made Gary D. Foster sensitive to the way overweight people are treated.
Recognizing "the significant discrimination that obese people suffer" was one of the things that got the director of the new Center for Obesity Research and Education at Temple University "jazzed up" about working in the field, he said during a recent interview.
"It's disturbing," he said. "So a lot of the work we try to do is to highlight that and to think about how it happens, how you can undo it. But it's a tough nut to crack."
A clinical psychologist, Foster began working on obesity research at the University of Pennsylvania in 1981. He said egregious examples of discrimination he has heard of toward overweight people - not at Temple or Penn, he emphasized - included people "being sent to the zoo for an MRI or to a loading dock to be weighed."
He said the center, which was launched March 1, would examine ways to improve the prevention and "treatment of obesity both for weight loss and maintenance." It will also examine the effect those treatments have on such problems as cardiovascular disease and sleep apnea, and factors regulating eating behavior.
Foster also is leading a 42-school study funded by the National Institutes of Health to examine school-based strategies to prevent obesity and diabetes. The center is also comparing low-carb and low-fat diets.
According to the most recent data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 32.2 percent of U.S. adults and 17.1 percent of U.S. children and adolescents are obese.
Foster joined Temple from Penn, where he was clinical director of the Weight and Eating Disorders Program. The Temple center receives $4.1 million in funding from the NIH.
He said one big reason he went to Temple was because the center will be "university-wide rather than limited to any one school" and will enable it to include work by physicians, nutritionists, psychologists, nurses and basic scientists.
Foster, 46, was born in Philadelphia and reared in Levittown. He received his bachelor's degree from Duquesne University, his master's from Penn, and his Ph.D. from Temple. All his degrees are in psychology.
He and his wife, Kathleen, a teacher at Episcopal Academy, have 7-year-old twins, Katie and Ryan, and a 6-year-old, Kevin. They live in Newtown Square.
Foster, who has never had a weight problem, enjoys playing basketball with his children, dining out, and spending time at such beach spots as the Jersey Shore and St. Martin in the Caribbean.
And each Presidents' Day weekend, he enjoys taking his family to a conference at Disney World, where he gives a talk on obesity and sleep apnea.
"It's a good chance to mix work with pleasure," he said.
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