By the way... Parents should be ashamed of chubby children

WE ARE told by the Health And Social Care Information Centre that diabetes could render the NHS bankrupt within a generation — it’s not hard to see why: the expenditure on treatment with drugs alone has increased by 50 per cent over the past six years.

The main reason for this looming nightmare is simple: the rise in obesity.

Obesity is due to gluttony — eating more than we need for the energy we expend. The penalty for this excess weight so many carry is that bodily systems fail. We simply do not have the physiology to cope and the result is type 2 diabetes.

The larger arteries clog up with cholesterol deposits, causing heart disease and brain rot.

The smaller arteries are also affected, leading to eye damage (diabetes is the most common cause of acquired blindness in the so-called civilised world), kidney failure and peripheral nerve damage.

We need to start at the beginning and halt this inexorable march towards obesity and the diseases that spin off from the diabetes that it causes.

This, therefore, is about education of children both at school and at home, as well as an attempt to re-educate parents about how children should be raised.

Society needs to take hold of the idea that to create an obese child is a form of abuse — it is creating a person who will have a shorter and unhealthier life than would be the case otherwise.

If it’s politically acceptable to penalise people for speeding in their cars to limit death on the roads, what have we got to say about, perhaps, penalising those who overfeed their children? Nothing as yet — but maybe this has to change.

If it is politically correct to dissuade people from smoking, because of the health hazards, what have we got to say about the poisons of too much refined sugar and too much salt?

The time must be coming when it will be essential to put pressure on people to stop them from eating themselves to death. It costs everyone else so much time and trouble on the way, and the nation — the NHS — cannot afford it.

This is about human behaviour: if we can instil, from an early age, respect for our bodies, encouraging a healthy approach to nutrition along with enjoyment of sport and exercise, and make it a matter of shame to fail in any of these areas, then there may be a shift in this through trend of obesity and diabetes.

Personal responsibility for health, that’s the mantra. Waiting for the NHS to save you later on from the damage you cause to yourself is for dummies.