A conference on weight loss & obsesity this week has generated some frightening headlines. Held by the National Forum on Obesity, speaker after speaker produced scary statistics.
Three out of four adults are now obese (the way our Body Mass Index was previously calculated is now thought to be inaccurate), and the number of children chronically obese is so worrying that one speaker proposed the radical solution of taking the worst offenders into care and giving them weight-loss surgery.
Children are getting fatter so fast that schools will have to order jumbo-sized furniture. And when we die, our coffins will be too big to fit in existing crematorium furnaces. So council tax will rise at the same rate as our chloresterol.
Over lunch, delegates could wander around the exhibition in the college library and take in the displays mounted by the conferences sponsors – Slim-Fast, and leading pharmaceutical companies including Roche (makers of Xenical, a weight loss drug) Sanofi-aventis (makers of Acomplia) and Abbott (makers of Reductil).
The bottom line is, we eat too much and we exercise too little. Children need to learn about nutrition and cookery as soon as they learn to read. Their parents need to be encouraged and incentivised to learn to cook.