The Obesity Crisis

According to the Government obesity/overweight is a major problem and it is getting worse. Here a few quotes from recent official publication entitled ‘’Healthy Weight, Healthy Lives: A Cross Government Strategy for England’’.

• ‘’Britain is in the grip of an epidemic.  Almost 2/3 of adults and 1/3 of children are either overweight or obese’’
• ‘’We are facing a public health problem the experts have told us is comparable to climate change in both its scale and complexity…’’
• ‘’…….there has been a clear rise in obesity rates, probably accelerating in the late 1980s and early 1990s…’’
• ‘……severely obese individuals are likely to die on average 11 years earlier…..than those of a healthy weight’’

In his campaign on school meals Jamie Oliver claimed that to-day’s school children would have a much shorter lifespan than their parents unless they improved the nutritional quality of the food that they eat.

All in all things seem to pretty bad. Given that there has apparently been a steady deterioration in the diet over the last 30-40 years it is instructive to examine how public heath has changed .So the information presented is likely to be of interest.

Over the past 25 years or so life expectancy has steadily increased and there is no suggestion that there is any fall off in the rate of increase. It is because of this improvement that the country is faced with a Pensions Time Bomb.

This figure shows why the life expectancy has improved. In the early part of the 20^th Century the infectious diseases were virtually eliminated as a major cause of death. There has also been significant progress with the respiratory diseases. The death rate from cancers has remained reasonably constant, although there was a  slight rise in the 1980s but more recently the rate is coming down.

The big success has been with the circulatory diseases, which include strokes and heart attacks. Over the last 50 years the death rate has been reduced by over 50%.

This figure shows that the good news also applies to children.

Furthermore when we look at what has happened in the last decade there have been very significant improvements in the death rates of children of all ages.

Results from the Health Survey ,England confirm that in England there has been a steady improvement in the health of school children.

It is a great pity that those providing advice to the Government did not bother to study the relevant data on public health before making their dire predictions about our health in the future.

It is blindingly obvious that although people have been getting heavier, public health has been improving significantly.  So if it follows that the dangers to health of being overweight or obese have probably been exaggerated.