Early in his medical career, Peter Vash, ’72, eagerly handed out business cards to colleagues. He was surprised by their reaction when they read the print. Why would a well-trained physician at UCLA Medical Center and fellow of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists want to dedicate a career treating overweight people?

“They didn’t see it the way I did,” Vash says. “I saw a tremendous wave of people in the future with unmet medical needs who really welcomed someone willing to work with them—specifically on this problem.”

Vash, 60, an expert in eating disorders, endo-crinology, and metabolism, was right. Obesity has exploded in America. Sixty-five percent of Americans are either overweight or obese, according to a 2002 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Roughly 15 percent of children in the United States are obese, a number that has doubled over the last 20 years. What’s more, there are more than 50 associated medical conditions with obesity, including hypertension, coronary artery disease, gallbladder disease, diabetes, blindness and certain types of cancer. The cost to treat obesity? About $117 billion a year, according to Vash.

“I am worried,” admits Vash, assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California and author of The Fat to Muscle Diet and The Dieter’s Dictionary. “The crisis is coming. I really think it is coming. This is a huge public health problem that seems to have eclipsed physicians knowing what to do and how to approach it.”

He frets over the health of future generations, especially children. “Children are watching more TV and playing more video games than ever before, and they are exposed to high caloric density foods which are readily available,” he says. “There is less physical activity in the schools. Today, you don’t have access to those activities, you sit home and watch TV, you eat and drink soda which I believe is closely linked with the obesity in children.”

There are no easy solutions, according to Vash, but if obesity isn’t taken seriously the repercussions will become even more serious. “I think there is a geopolitical component to obesity,” Vash says. “We’re compromising our ability to compete in a global economy if we lose our vitality, vigor, and strength. I’m worried about this younger generation”

There is a lot of information out there. Book stores are crammed with diet books and magazines touting quick and easy ways to shed unwanted pounds. An endless stream of appetite-suppressing pills flow out of pharmaceutical companies. And each year there emerges a new diet guru with a plan guaranteed to make followers slim and attractive. “There is so much confusing information,” says Vash.

Still, Americans are overweight, and that carries a stigma. Conventional wisdom suggests that obese people can cure themselves by cutting back the amount they eat. But it is much more complicated than sheer will power, according to Vash, who is quick to point out that obesity is not like some cancers that can be cured with surgery, or some heart ailments with medication. He refers to obesity as a “psycho-social disease.”

 “This doesn’t fit in either camp,” he says. “We have the patient’s own make-up and personality to consider. One can live without cigarettes, but with regard to nourishment we can’t tell them to simply stop eating, and things will get better. The recipe to treat these patients is with competent and compassionate physicians who are not biased against fat patients,” he contends.

Vash’s patients are suffering. “After they realize I can be trusted, they start reaching for the box of Kleenex and really let loose,” he says. “I can sense how deep the void is. We’re treating human beings with a bad disease. They are frightened and in a lot of pain.”

He pursued a medical education because he liked to help people. It was a profession Vash was familiar with as a young boy since his father was an internist. The youngster accompanied his father on house calls and was impressed how people responded to a medical doctor. “These experiences instilled in me that the physician was special, not more important, but special,” he says.

Vash attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., where he received a degree in biology. After receiving a master’s in biochemistry at Villanova University in Philadelphia, he enrolled at Maryland. After graduation he served his internship and residency at the University of California, Los Angeles. And in 1978, he completed the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program.

While in the scholars program, Vash received a master’s degree in public health and started an outpatient obesity study clinic at UCLA Medical Center. “It was clear there was a need for this, and I found it very fulfilling,” says Vash, who is also executive medical director of the Lindora Medical Clinics, operating the largest medical weight-loss clinics in Southern California.

In 1978, he opened a private practice to treat obese patients. They range from 20 to 60 years old and range from 25 to 300 pounds overweight. One patient comes to Dr. Vash in tears because her knees and hips throb with pain. She needs epidurals to relieve the pain. “Obesity,” Vash says, “may not kill you outright, but over time it will maim you. It will erode the quality of your life.”

Vash, who celebrates a 35th medical school reunion this spring, has helped many patients live more normal lives, but his mission is now a little different since his early days in the field. He’s now more of a spokesman. “I would like to be a physician who helps other physicians recognize obesity as a real disease worthy of compassionate treatment,” he says. “It is certainly worthy of further study if we are ever really going to help prevent a health crisis catastrophe.”