By MARTIN JOHNSTON health reporter
New Zealand is losing the conscience of its waistline, says Associate Professor Boyd Swinburn, who is heading for a land of fatter funding for obesity prevention.
The Auckland Medical School researcher and medical director of the National Heart Foundation is preparing for a job at a Melbourne university next year.
Dr Swinburn has spent the past decade warning New Zealanders about heart disease risks and trying to persuade them to eat less fat, quit smoking and exercise more.
He said this week that we were eating more healthily but still had a long way to go.
The messages were applied less well by poorer people and Maori and Pacific Islanders since their food choices were more restricted.
He decided to leave partly because he was declined funding by the Health Research Council for more research on preventing obesity, an international epidemic that is hitting New Zealand and which points to a big rise in diabetes.
Some of the research he wanted to do was similar to an earlier project aimed at helping fish 'n' chip shops convert to a healthier form of fat and reduce the fat content of their fare by refining cooking techniques.
Dr Swinburn said that while his move was not motivated by sour grapes over the council's decision, Australia was attractive as it was further ahead both in research spending and obesity prevention programmes.
Massey University's professor of nutrition, John Birkbeck, said that as one of New Zealand's leading obesity researchers, Dr Swinburn would leave a big gap.
The Auckland Medical School dean, Professor Peter Gluckman, said Government spending per capita on health research in New Zealand was about a third of most Western countries.
The Government would spend about $65 million this year on health research.
Private-sector funding had declined sharply with the reduced activity of the pharmaceuticals industry because of Pharmac's hard-nosed policies on drug price contracts, he said.
The Government was making encouraging noises about more research funding, but "we are still a long way from the levels of research funding necessary to compete in the [global] knowledge economy and to retain staff."
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