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Maybe, when it comes to finding a way out of a global crisis of obesity, we're just thinking too small.

Maybe the steps needed to reverse a pandemic of unhealthy weight gain are the same as those needed to solve two other crises of human health: malnutrition and climate change.

So instead of trying to tackle each of these problems individually, public health experts recommend that we lash the three together.

In a treatise published recently in the British medical journal Lancet, a multinational commission argues that consumers, business leaders and policymakers must focus their efforts on steps that address at least two of these crises at a time. Only then can they can resolve this trio of emergencies fast and fully enough to make a difference, they wrote.

And no, the experts added: Tackling climate change, world hunger and obesity all at once is not an overreach.

But, the commission warned, it will require an ambitious restructuring of the economic incentives that drive the production and marketing of food. It will require new kinds of transportation systems. And it will demand that consumers demand and help pay for food that is subsidized, raised and distributed in new ways.