Food industry blamed for surge in obesity

Sarah Boseley, health editor
Friday September 13, 2002
The Guardian

At least three in four of British men and women will be overweight within 10 to 15 years, according to health professionals who accuse governments of failing to tackle the problem because of fear of the food and drink industry.
An extraordinary rise in the numbers of the overweight and obese has taken place in the last 20 years. In 1980 6% of men and 8% of women were overweight. By the mid 1980s, that had doubled. Now 65.5% of men and 55.2% of women are overweight or obese in the UK, and the numbers are climbing.

A European Union summit on obesity in Copenhagen yesterda brought together government ministers and health professionals. They heard that obesity was becoming more of a threat than smoking.

A report from the International Obesity Taskforce said that a ban on tobacco advertising should be followed by restrictions to stop industry targeting children with adverts for junk food and sweets and prevent the installation of vending machines for soft drinks in schools.

"Officials are pretty terrified around the whole of Europe about how to confront some of these huge vested interests," Philip James, chairman of the taskforce, told the summit.

"The fast food and soft drink industries have enormous vested interests which we need to confront. If we don't, the epidemic of childhood obesity is going to rip through Europe so fast - with Britain being in the worst category - that we will have clinics of diabetic children of 13, where the evidence is clear that they will have major problems of blindness by the time they get into their 30s.

"Kidney units should be regearing because they are going to need huge numbers of kidney transplants and dialysis."

Neville Rigby, director of public affairs at the taskforce, said there had been "a quantum shift" in what was happening to people's body mass because of the changes in diet and the lifestyle.

Between 1993 and 2000, the numbers of young men aged 16 to 24 classified as obese - with a body mass index of more than 30 - jumped from 4.9% to 9.3%. The rise in the 25 to 34 age group in the same seven years was from 10% to 20.3%. "These should be the fit young men who are the pride of the nation," he said.

Among 16- to 24-year-old women the rise was 11.1% to 15.7%. Even more alarming, he said, was a new category of super-obese women, with a body mass index of 40 or more. These women - so large they cannot tie their shoelaces or occupy a single seat on a bus - were 1% of the age group in 1993. By 2000 they were 2.4%.

Men and women who carry excess weight risk heart disease, cancers and diabetes. Type two diabetes, usually caused by obesity, used to be unknown in childhood but now paediatricians are having to learn how to treat it.

The couch potato lifestyle had made weight problems worse, but the chief reason for the epidemic was diet, said the taskforce report, which criticises the industry for targeting children.

"Large business interests are involved in both promoting sedentary behaviour and the passive over-consumption of food," it said. "The food and drink industry seeks to focus on inactivity and promote sports to divert attention from the role of food and drinks. Analysis of marketing strategies shows a targeting of the young and particularly of pre-school children to establish brand preferences."