Take the weight off the NHS

WHEN we can at last enjoy a life beyond simple survival, another major health issue will still be crying out for attention.

We’re too fat - and it’s costing a fortune in health care and miserable lives. That’s the brutal, simple truth and we need to start giving it the attention it deserves.

The alternative is to allow the dreadful scale of illness and death linked to obesity to continue to rise and put hundreds of thousands of overweight people at greater risk when the next coronavirus arrives.

It didn’t take a genius to see that body weight would be a factor in a respiratory disease, and studies showed that obese people were more than twice as likely as those of a healthy weight to die from Covid-19.

Research in Spain found that a combination of reduced outdoor activities, boredom, increased television viewing and snacking led to almost half of the population putting on up to six pounds.

So, there’s likely to be a further rise in the UK’S obesity figures when we emerge from the shadow of the virus.

We hear so many statistics these days but a few deserve repeating: ■■Obesity costs the NHS more than £6 billion per year. ■■It is the UK’S biggest cause of cancer after smoking. ■■It was the primary or secondary reason for 867,000 hospital admissions in 2018-19. ■■And – I’d like to say shockingly but it’s utterly predictable – the poor suffer most, with people in deprived areas four times more likely to be admitted to hospital as a direct result of obesity than those in the richest areas.

It’s easy for politicians to talk of “lifestyle choices” and “personal responsibility” but there are five times as many fastfood outlets in poor areas as in affluent ones and, as one commentator observed, taking the dog for a walk around the lawns of Chequers is more appealing than taking exercise on many urban housing estates.

We are slowly emerging from the greatest health education, treatment and prevention programme this country has ever seen. For all its flaws, it has shown how a nationwide health crisis can be tackled. Combating obesity should be a doddle after this.

So let’s have big subsidies in the price of fruit and veg, free gym and swim sessions, cut-price activity trackers, prizes for lifestyle changes, free yoga and dancing classes, Boris Johnson doing Pilates on the telly…

It would not come cheap but if we get it right, the cost would be dwarfed by the weight taken off the NHS.