Why obesity is the new elephant in the room!

WHEN it comes to big complex social problems, it’s tempting to find a bad guy to blame.

We see this time and again with obesity, where everything from genes to a lack of green spaces has been held responsible for the country’s bulging waistline.

In the firing line this week is advertising, with a coalition of the Royal Colleges and health charities calling for adverts for junk food to be banned during peak viewing times. Is this the answer? I don’t think so. Obesity is a relatively new problem; for the majority of our time on the planet, our problem was getting enough food to survive. But with the end of rationing after World War II, we’ve had increasing access to calorie-dense foods.

The rate of people considered clinically obese has risen from just 1 to 2 per cent in the Sixties to more than 25 per cent now. What’s going on? I think the answer lies in a study conducted a few years ago by the Department of Health that compared data from 1967 and 2010. Differences in lifestyle are clearly a factor: for instance, while 75 per cent of us walked for at least half an hour a day in the Sixties, now it’s just 40 per cent.

But what really stands out is the sharp contrast in attitudes. In 1967 nine out of ten people had attempted to lose weight in the past year compared with 57 per cent of adults in 2010. Most tellingly, 40 years ago only 7 per cent of people who considered themselves overweight had not done anything about it, compared with nearly half now.

So we just aren’t bothering to lose weight any more. And it’s no use banning adverts for foods that make you fat, if people don’t actually care if they’re fat.

Where has this complacency come from? It may be partly down to the fact that as more people are overweight, it’s viewed as increasingly normal — helped by the ‘big is beautiful’ mantra.

Meanwhile, doctors are wary of saying patients are ‘fat’ for fear of causing offence, too scared to confront the elephant in the room (excuse the pun). But let’s be honest, it’s also hard to listen to a doctor or nurse lecture you about obesity when so many are overweight themselves.

We need a social shift in how we view obesity so it’s less socially acceptable — and the place to start is surely in the ranks of the NHS itself.