---

Combating Obesity

I am heartened by the Minister’s speech and her conclusions, not least because they were similar to those I arrived at, possibly with more detail attached to them. The problem is known—we have increased levels of obesity; more overweight children; higher risks of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, infertility and early death—and, a bit like the credit crunch, it is worldwide. Most industrial nations, although they vary a little, depending on climate, demography and the national diet, suffer from that problem, and it appears to be concentrated among the urban poor. The causes are almost universally understood, too, but they are numerous: the mechanisation of labour in the home and in the workplace, which is good and irreversible but has consequences; the availability of cheap, personal transport door-to-door, whether it is to school—the infamous school run—or to work; and the attractions—we should not deny them—of sedentary pursuits, because the computer offers a lot, the TV always did, and the TV with the remote control takes away the necessity of even getting up to change the channel. We have already mentioned the industrialisation of food production: the ready, microwaveable meal, fast-food production and the decline in home cooking and home food production, which is coupled with the inevitable but contrary rise in the purchase of cook books—regularly bought but invariably not used very much. Further to that, there is the habit, as alluded to in one intervention, of people not eating as families but engaging in activities known as foraging and snacking. Then there is physical activity and the end of playing out, which used to be such a simple thing. Children would play out in the street in which they lived or in the neighbouring street, but in many cases that is now seen by neighbours as a social nuisance or a threat, and by parents as a personal hazard or social danger, so it does not happen a great deal. If we add to that the reduction in school sports, as extra-curricular activity is squeezed by the need to get good results, we have an increasingly inactive youth population. Even things as praiseworthy as the Disability Discrimination Acts, which are intended to serve the needs of the disabled, have led to a plethora of lifts, so that able-bodied and overweight people need to go neither up nor down stairs. I am slightly amazed and appalled—the puritan in me is coming out—when I see people in this place who are clearly overweight but take a lift to go one floor down. I feel like commenting, but I restrain myself, and perhaps it is just as well. It does happen, however. We can add to that another social problem, which is the increase in social drinking, because drink, believe it or not, contains calories, and it gives society a huge additional headache. Some individuals—we do notice them—counteract those factors by efforts of will: they jog in their lunchtime, although jogging along the banks of the River Thames has almost become in itself a social nuisance; and some go to gyms in the evening. But I do not think that anybody can be anything other than fatalistic about relying on heroic acts of individual will, and if we considered more mundane things such as the slimming industry and its value for money, we would arrive at some pretty grim conclusions. Science offers some, albeit limited, hope. We will understand more about metabolic rates and the tendency of some people to put on weight and others to do so to a lesser extent, and we will get better at identifying risks and diagnosing the physiological and psychological factors in eating and overeating. However, at the end of the day, as the Minister suggested, the cultural changes are sizeable and we might genuinely question whether any Government have the tools to address them because, as we all know, the fundamental problem is that too much of the wrong food is eaten and too little physical activity is undertaken. My analysis is that the population once stayed fit through what I call inertial factors, that it got fat through inertial factors—it was not a question of people deliberately deciding to behave differently—and that we can only really solve the problem through inertial factors. We can solve it only by creating a climate in which people stay thin—a non-obesogenic environment. I welcome many of the initiatives, such as better nutritional advice for families, which, surely, has its place. We would be mistaken if we thought people naturally acquired that advice through osmosis; it needs to be taught, and sometimes taught in schools. I also welcome the educational programmes and the recent more long-term thinking about school dinners and the disastrous effect—I observed this in the past as a teacher—that unguided choice in developing dietary preferences has had. I have seen children walk past salad bars and all sorts of healthy eating options only to go for the pizza and the chips, and the next day do exactly the same—and the day after that as well. However, I worry that if we concentrate too much on children’s eating habits and mishandle the issue, we may aggravate eating disorders among children and adolescents, and we want to do nothing of the sort. I welcome, too, food labelling and simple—