Dr. Robert Jeffery Continues His Legacy of Advancing Research on Obesity Prevention
By Mo Perry
“If you want to prevent disease rather than treat it, public health is the way you should spend your money.”
When Robert Jeffery, PhD, joined the University of Minnesota School of Public Health (SPH) in 1979, less than five percent of men and eight percent of women were obese1. Cut to 2021, and more than 40 percent of American adults now meet that definition2. It’s a trajectory that Jeffery has dedicated his career to understanding — and to interrupting.
As the Covid-19 pandemic has made painfully clear, addressing obesity is critical to preventing both chronic and acute disease. From high blood pressure and diabetes to higher risk for severe outcomes from the novel coronavirus, obesity is one of our nation’s most urgent public health challenges. After dedicating his career to this challenge, Jeffery is continuing to make an impact on obesity research as a philanthropist.
While pursuing his PhD in Psychology at Stanford University in the late 1970s, Jeffery became interested in obesity as a psychological issue, not simply a biological one. “Everyone knows what to do to control their weight, but people have trouble doing it,” he notes. “So in graduate school I started playing around with interventions to help people lose weight.”
Upon receiving his PhD, Jeffery accepted an offer to join the University of Minnesota’s Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene (LPH). The lab was founded by famed physiologist and dietary researcher Ancel Keys in 1937 and housed until 1992 beneath the south stands of Memorial Stadium. In 1983, LPH merged with the Division of Epidemiology under the leadership of Jeffery’s then-boss, Henry Blackburn. At the same time, national rates of obesity began to skyrocket.
Most people who study obesity are biologists with a purely biological lens on the issue, says Jeffery. But environmental, epidemiological, and even economic insights also have a role to play. “Environmental factors such as the food supply, prevalence of foods that are high in fat and sugar, and the availability of sugar-sweetened beverages map along with obesity rates, both individually and at the population level.”
Jeffery started exploring how behavioral epidemiology (the study of the role of behavioral factors in health) could affect people’s choices. “I wondered, if you increase the price of sugar-sweetened beverages and decrease the cost of vegetables, would that change people’s choices and weight?” He conducted experiments in a cafeteria setting, changing the prices of various products, and found that the adjustments did indeed lead people to make healthier choices.
In 2004, one of the deans at SPH, impressed by Jeffery’s prowess at receiving substantial grants from the National Institute of Health (NIH), encouraged Jeffery to launch his own center within the school. Jeffery founded the Obesity Prevention Center, now known as the Healthy Weight Research Center (HWRC), with a mission to conduct research to better understand the causes of weight gain and to develop more effective measures for addressing the problem. Though Jeffery retired from the university in 2016, he continues to donate generously to support the HWRC and its work.
“When I got into this work, initially there was little attention to the public health aspects of obesity,” Jeffery says. “I and others were instrumental in changing that, and it’s now widely accepted that doing something about it might require public health measures rather than preaching that people do something on their own.”
Jeffery knows that changing the trajectory of population-level obesity rates is an uphill battle, given the pervasive industrial forces at play. Which is all the more reason he feels strongly about giving generously to support the work of the HWRC, including providing seed money to fund the work of junior researchers as they lay the foundation to pursue their own research grants.
“Funding for public health is tiny in comparison to what the [food] industry spends for their purposes,” notes Jeffery. “The biggest argument in favor of public health is that it’s prevention, and if you can prevent disease from happening, then you don’t have to spend money on treating it. That’s what public health is all about.”
1 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/global-obesity-rates-doubled-1980/story?id=12833461
2 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesity-overweight.htm
