There was a time when obesity expert Professor John Funder had a ready-made measure of his own dimensions – the dinner suit passed on to him by his late maternal grandfather Stan Watson. “I am a bit taller than him so I had to wear long black socks to avoid showing a bit of leg,” says Professor Funder who has become a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for eminent service to medicine. “Stan Watson was an engineer who built the piers from which the Anzacs evacuated from Gallipoli.”
At 74, Professor Funder has just stepped down as head of Obesity Australia and has good news for the bulging Aussie waistline. “There has been a ‘Eureka’ moment,” he says about a new medication developed recently at the Salk Institute in San Diego. “It is taken orally and stimulates the secretion of bile and pancreatic juices so that you feel as though you have just had a meal and are no longer hungry. It will be 10 years before it has been properly tested and trialled but, all going well, I think will essentially supplement or replace surgery.”
Funder, a researcher, author and educator in cardiovascular endocrinology, has been a senior fellow of Prince Henry’s Institute of Medical Research since 2001 and has published more than 500 scientific papers. A professor of medicine at Melbourne University since 1984, he is the father of three children. He remarried after his wife died of cancer 16 years ago.
Professor Funder has worked in the areas of mental illness and indigenous eye health as well as obesity. He confesses that, by normal standards he is overweight at 100kg, even after shedding 20kg in the past 10 years. “By normal criteria I should be about 85. The only time I have been ‘normal’ weight is when I did National Service, running around 11 hours a day and eating everything I could lay your hands on. And the weight peeled off.”
However, despite Australian males being the world’s third-fattest, Funder says their premature death rate is the second-lowest. “People today are better muscled and have terrific access to good food.”
Funder cautions people against “ideal weight” tables. “They are probably wrong anyhow,” he says. “But if an obese person can lose 5 or 10 per cent of bodyweight, that can have a remarkable effect on glucose tolerance [a factor in developing diabetes] and blood pressure.”