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Obesity and Fatty Liver Disease

I beg to move,

That this House has considered obesity and fatty liver disease.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Efford, alongside my parliamentary colleagues who have kindly come along this morning to debate and highlight the public health emergency that is obesity and fatty liver disease.

The vast majority of us do not often think about the health of our livers. If we do, our biggest concern is how many units of alcohol we drink every week and whether our livers can keep up. But we do talk about our weight a fair amount, either in terms of how we look and how our clothes fit, or, if we are linking it to disease, whether we are blocking up our arteries and risking a heart attack. Today I want to make the case for linking our concerns about being overweight and sedentary with the very real risk of developing fatty liver disease. Before I give the alarming statistics about the huge increase in liver disease in the UK, I want us all to hold on to the fact that a weight loss of 10% can halt and even reverse fatty liver disease progression, and the way to help us all to do that is not to point fingers and tell individuals to try harder. There are much more effective public health solutions than that.

Now for the alarming statistics that should give us all pause for thought: after heart disease, liver disease is the biggest cause of premature mortality and lost working years of life in the UK. In stark contrast with other killer diseases where the mortality rate has gone down, deaths from liver disease have increased by 400%—yes, 400%—over the past two decades. Every year we are seeing 18,000 deaths from liver disease. It is now the biggest killer of 35 to 49-year-olds in the UK. In two to three years it is set to surpass heart disease as the leading cause of premature death in the UK.

Today’s debate matters because fatty liver disease is becoming one of the defining public health challenges of our generation—a disease that already affects as many as one in five adults in the UK, equating to about 1 million people, but one that hardly anyone knows about. When I asked my parliamentary colleagues to speak in today’s debate, they said, “Fatty liver disease? What’s that?” So hopefully this debate will highlight this alarming disease.

Closely linked to our ongoing struggles with obesity, fatty liver disease—for the record, its clinical name is metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease; that is the last time I am going to say that today—is deeply rooted in our broken food systems and the stark health inequalities that our communities face.