Congress may have just passed historic heath care reform, but some say unless the body politic addresses the root cause of burgeoning health care costs, such as obesity, those costs will soon triple with devastating economic consequences.

That's the view of Yale preventive health expert Dr. David L. Katz, who forecasts by 2048 every American adult will be obese if the current trends continue.

Katz delivered the ominous projections during an informative and humorous presentation to an audience of 100 at St. Luke Church on Sunday sponsored by the Westport/Weston Interfaith Council.

"Obesity portends diabetes and is on the causal pathway for every chronic disease," Katz said. "It is a potent risk factor for all cancers but two — squamous cell skin cancer and brain cancer."

"We could reduce heart disease by 80 percent, diabetes by 90 percent and cancer by as much as 60 percent with the knowledge we already have," Katz said.

Katz shared creative strategies he and his preventive health collaborators at Turn the Tide, the Derby-based foundation he established, have devised to alter American eating, lifestyle patterns and food choices.

"Fingers, forks and feet," are the three F's of his approach.

His most urgent target is children, who are suffering a novel epidemic of Type-2 diabetes, once known as adult-onset diabetes.

Foods packed with sugar, salt and saturated fats are the cause of the "metabolic mayhem" overtaxing the pancreas and liver, leading to diabetes and other chronic diseases, he said.

Madison Avenue advertising pitched to children must be curbed and regulated, he said, giving the example of a "fruit punch" drink consisting entirely of water, sugar and artificial flavorings and colorings but no fruit.

To counter deceptive advertising and confusing nutritional claims on packaging, Katz and his colleagues at the Yale Griffin Prevention Research Center and a panel of 13 experts have devised a nutrition quality labeling system.

Named "Nuval" — for nutritional value — the ranking is based on a complex algorithm that divides values attributed to more than 30 good nutrients, such as vitamins, minerals, and calcium, by values assigned to bad nutrition factors, such as cholesterol, saturated fat and sodium.

The goal is to make shopping for nutritional food simpler and more efficient.

So far, the ongoing project has rated 45,000 foods — just 5,000 short of the average 50,000 products in the average grocery store, Katz said.

For example, Cap'n Crunch sweetened corn and oat cereal scores 10 on the nutrition scale of 1 to 100, with 1 being the lowest nutritional value. Shredded wheat and bran scores 91. Add skim milk and a banana to that and the shredded wheat scores a perfect 100.

The nutrition ranking is already implemented at Big Y supermarkets in the Hartford area and may come to a supermarket near you, providing enough consumer pressure exists for it.

Another project, "ABC for Fitness," delivers instructional materials to schools and parents to encourage them to include "activity bursts in the classroom."

Another name for the project is "No Child Left [on their] Behind," said Katz, noting that schools are eliminating recess periods to increase time for academic work to meet testing standards.

"Learning retention is better if children are moving," he said. "Recess not ritalin" is the goal.

Another project Katz is promoting through his Turn the Tide Foundation is called "Nutrition Detectives," an educational program that makes nutrition label sleuthing fun.

On the national level, Katz is advocating incentives for recipients of food stamps to encourage them to purchase nutritious items over junk food.

"In most of human history, calories were scarce and hard to get, and physical activity was unavoidable," Katz said. "Human ingenuity has created a world where physical activity is scarce and hard to get and calories are unavoidable."

     For more information, visit www.davidkatzmd.com