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Obesity

It is a privilege to speak under your chairmanship, Mrs Riordan. I am delighted to have secured the debate. I have come to notice, particularly with health-related issues, that an hon. Member may think they are well informed on a topic when they succeed in securing a debate, but once they have succeeded in securing it, the administrative back-up kicks in and all the groups involved start supplying them with significant amounts of promotional material, and they are even more well informed by the time the debate arrives. I thank all the groups involved with this issue for providing me with information. Sometimes it is wise to start a very serious debate with a slightly humorous anecdote. I am reminded of the overweight gentleman who was sent along to his local well man clinic by his wife, as men are wont to be. She instructed him to go to the well man clinic and to come back with precise instructions on what he was to do to lose weight. When he came back with a smile on his face, his wife said, ““There's something wrong here. What exactly were you told?”” He said, ““Well, I'm exactly the right weight—for someone who is 7 foot 8.”” Unfortunately, that encapsulates part of the problem. A sedentary lifestyle is not only costing those members of society who are overweight very dearly; it is costing all of us exceptionally dearly. From the correspondence that I have had and my own research, it appears that obesity currently costs us—depending on whom we believe—between £4 billion and £7 billion a year directly and indirectly. Whichever figure is right, the reality in 2011 is that we are talking about an exceptionally expensive but preventable series of conditions. The situation is bad at the moment, but unless we take radical steps and measures, unless we do something fundamental—I will come to that later—the rates of obesity are likely to double in the next 30 years. Currently, almost one third of children are overweight, so obesity is not a condition that is the preserve of either the elderly or the middle-aged. All of us in society, right across the age spectrum, are being affected. Only 20 years ago, people who visited America—perhaps somewhere such as Florida—would come back here and say, ““The United States has a terrible obesity problem. Thankfully we will never be like that.”” But we are, and things are likely to get worse. For example, 25 years ago, about three quarters of schoolchildren walked or cycled to school; now, less than 10% do so. When giving that figure, I take into account the fact that there have been lifestyle changes, school closures and so on, but the fact remains that there has been a significant increase in sedentary lifestyles. There has been a change in attitudes. The unfortunate reality is that more and more of us are spending more and more time at desks, in front of computers. Many people become couch potatoes—unfortunately, that analogy is all too accurate. I will give another statistic to show how things have got considerably worse. In the early 1980s, roughly 7% of the population were classed as overweight. That ratio has trebled in the past 30 years. We can see the trend. It is likely to double again in the next 30 years. We must get to grips with a problem that, as I said, is proving exceptionally expensive for us all. Obesity is linked to socio-economic deprivation. The figures that I have been able to establish indicate that the ratio of children in lower-income households suffering from obesity is twice that of those in higher-income households. Again, we see the repetitive nature of the problem, the cyclical response that is indicative, because many obese children are, unfortunately, the children of either one obese parent or two. Of course, we all know of the additional and subsequent health risks associated with this condition. We are all aware that heart attacks and strokes, coronary artery disease and type 2 diabetes are much more likely among the overweight. There is an additional cost further down the line, in years to come, as people who begin to be overweight today begin to show the symptoms of those other conditions only in years to come and then of course have to be treated by the NHS.