Obesity crisis means 40 million Brits could be overweight by the year 2035

Future generations could be faced with severe health problems and shorter lifespans if action is not taken now to tackle an obesity crisis that is threatening to spiral out of control, according to a new report.

The Obesity Health Alliance has estimated that about 40 million adults in the UK could be classed as overweight or obese within 2 decades, with over 7.6 million new cases of disease by 2035. Being overweight is defined as having a body mass index (BMI) of between 25 and 29.9, whilst obese is defined as having a BMI of 30 or more.

Widespread weight gain in Brits may result in 4.62 million cases of type 2 diabetes, 1.63 million cases of coronary heart disease, and 670,000 new cases of cancer, warned the new study.

This isn’t even taking into account other major health issues that can arise from piling on the pounds, not including conditions such as high blood pressure (hypertension), liver disease, osteoarthritis, or chronic kidney disease, which can all plain a huge burden on already stretched NHS resources.
Furthermore, becoming obese may then ignite other issues like poor and unhealthy eating, low self-esteem and mental health problems.

However, with swift action, a small change now could make a big difference in the future. Even just a 1% change in the number of people gaining weight every year up until 2035 may avoid around 77,000 cases of disease including 45,000 cases of type 2 diabetes in the year 2035 alone.

Therefore, the Obesity Health Alliance is urging the Government to create a substantial childhood obesity strategy immediately to combat the obesity epidemic. Measures the group want introducing include a restriction on junk food TV advertising prior to the 9pm watershed, tightening online marketing to align with broadcast regulations, as well as setting targets for industry to reduce the amount of sugar and fat in food.

Alison Cox, Cancer Research UK’s director of prevention and member the Obesity Health Alliance, said: “These numbers are shocking. And it’s difficult to think of the impact this will have on public health and an already strained NHS. Without bold action, the next generation will face more disease and live shorter lives.

“Kids are bombarded with advertisements for unhealthy food and if we are to give our children the chance for better and healthier lives, it’s vital the Government’s childhood obesity strategy restricts this kind of marketing.”

Modi Mwatsama, Director of Policy and Global Health at the UK Health Forum and member of the Obesity Health Alliance, said: “This study is a wakeup call for the Government and shows a daunting future if no strong action is taken against the obesity epidemic.
“We can’t expect industry to make changes on their own and people need help making healthier choices. Companies will have to be held accountable by Government. The Government must lead the way by creating a level playing field with independent, regulated targets for reducing the amount of sugar, fat and salt in food. Without Government action, our children face a life of disease and early death.”
According to the European Association for the Study of Obesity, here are some key facts to remember about it:

• Worldwide obesity has nearly doubled since 1980.
• In 2008, more than 1.4 billion adults, 20 and older, were overweight. Of these over 200 million men and nearly 300 million women were obese.
• 35% of adults aged 20 and over were overweight in 2008, and 11% were obese.
• 65% of the world’s population live in countries where overweight and obesity kills more people than underweight.
• Overweight and obesity are the fifth leading risk for global deaths. At least 2.8 million adults die each year as a result of being overweight or obese.
• 44% of the diabetes burden, 23% of the ischaemic heart disease burden and between 7% and 41% of certain cancer burdens are attributable to overweight and obesity.
• More than 40 million children under the age of five were overweight in 2011.
• Obesity is preventable.

Obesity will not just happen to somebody overnight. It is something that develops gradually over time, mainly due to poor diet and lifestyle choices.

NHS choices have listed the main dietary pitfalls that cause people to gain weight, which include:

• Eating large amounts of processed or fast food – that’s high in fat and sugar.
• Drinking too much alcohol – alcohol contains a lot of calories, and people who drink heavily are often overweight.
• Dating out a lot – you may be tempted to also have a starter or dessert in a restaurant, and the food can be higher in fat and sugar.
• Eating larger portions than you need – you may be encouraged to eat too much if your friends or relatives are also eating large portions.
• Drinking too many sugary drinks – including soft drinks and fruit juice.
• Comfort eating – if you have low self-esteem or feel depressed, you may eat to make yourself feel better.

Lack of physical activity is a key factor behind obesity, with many using their cars to get around and doing less walking or cycling. Moreover, we are becoming a nation of TV and computer game addicts, instead of getting out and doing regular exercise.


The Department of Health recommends that each week adults should be engaging in at least 150 minutes (2 and a half hours) of moderate-intensity aerobic activity, such as cycling or fast walking. However, this doesn’t need to be done all in one go. For example, you could exercise for 30 minutes a day for 5 days in the week.

Medical Specialists® Pharmacy are able to provide help for those trying to lose weight, with our fantastic range of obesity treatments such as Xenical and Orlistat. Used in conjunction with a balanced diet and exercise, these treatments are very effective in enabling people to lose weight and regain confidence again.

Pounds gained for lbs lost: Overweight people could be paid to lose weight

The UK obesity crisis has reached such epic proportions – one in 4 Brits are now classified as obese – that the NHS are now throwing their weight behind a plan to reward people who successfully lose weight.

Under proposed new plans, employers will be encouraged to offer incentives to employees who manage to shed the pounds, such as cash or shopping vouchers. The scheme will be aimed at relieving the huge financial strain on the NHS through the care for overweight or obese patients, and related health complications.

New ways to try and tackle the growing problem of obesity comprise of just a few methods proposed in a “radical” overhaul of the country’s healthcare system proposed by the NHS for the next parliament. Tax cuts for volunteers and “breaking down the boundaries” between GPs and hospitals have also been discussed in the report by NHS England.

However, it is not just work employees that are being encouraged to watch their waistlines, with NHS staff being urged to “set a national example” by adhering to healthier lifestyles. There are plans to prevent access to unhealthy food on NHS sites and monitor the health and wellbeing of NHS staff.
The report also states that local authorities should be stricter on fast-food and alcohol outlets to improve the overall health of their community.

“Put bluntly, as the nation’s waistline keeps piling on the pounds, we’re piling on billions of pounds in future taxes just to pay for preventable illnesses,” the report says.

 There could be a “severe consequences” for patients if the healthcare system is not revamped and improved according to officials, who are also pleading with an increase in funding from the next government.

However, top doctor Clive Peedell said: “This policy will do nothing to help the millions of unemployed and the growing numbers of self-employed people who may need help but won’t qualify.”

NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens commented: “We have no choice but to do this. If we do it a better NHS is possible, if we don’t the consequences for patients will be severe.”

Sir Bruce Keogh, national medical director of NHS England, said the NHS remains “one of the best healthcare systems in the world”, but stressed: “We’ve squeezed the orange really hard over the last four years. People working in the NHS are really beginning to feel the pressure.”

Mr Stevens added that he believed a tax-payer funded health system has resulted in a “blind spot” with regards to the healthcare of employees, and that despite success in other countries abroad, workplace schemes to encourage workers to lose weight have been relatively ignored in this country.
He said: “The principal point is that employers in many countries have developed voluntary schemes for their employees whereby for example you actually get cash back based on participation in Weight Watchers or other type schemes.”

When quizzed as to what kind of rewards may be on offer, he said: “It could be shopping vouchers, it could be cash, it could be prizes”, adding that the rewards could be higher or lower for the person depending on how much weight had been shed.

The NHS are considering “challenging” companies to introduce the schemes instead of offering them money.

According to Mr Stevens obesity is “getting worse in some respects” highlighted childhood obesity as “a significant future health threat”.

He said: “When your son or daughter starts primary school one in 10 children are obese. By the time they reach Year 6 that’s doubled to one in five so something is going wrong with the way in which we are keeping our children healthy and setting them up for a good start in life.”

Junk food diets could stop people craving healthier food

Scientists warn that a diet full of fatty junk food and sugary treats could actually work to destroy our urge to consume healthy food products.

An Australian study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology with rats found that not only did the rats gain significant weight eating junk food, it seemed to kill any desire for them to eat healthier food. This could perhaps help to understand behavioural changes in people that regularly eat ‘bad’ foods and appear to exhibit low willpower, putting them at risk of overindulging and obesity.

The researchers believe that by consistently eating junk food, this has a big impact on the reward circuit areas of animals’ brains. One such part affected they say is the orbitofrontal cortex, an area associated with decision-making. The experts involved in the study say the findings may have implications for a human’s ability to limit eating certain foods due to the fact the reward circuitry is similar in every mammal.

Professor Margaret Morris, from the University of New South Wales, said: “The interesting thing about this finding is that if the same thing happens in humans, eating junk food may change our responses to signals associated with food rewards. It’s like you’ve just had ice cream for lunch, yet you still go and eat more when you hear the ice cream van come by.”

For two weeks the team involved in the study fed one group of rats healthy rat food, with a second group being access to unhealthy human foods such as pie, dumplings, cookies and cake.

All of the rats were given cherry and grape sugar water to drink. The rats eating junk food were consuming 150% more calories and their weight had increased by 10% after the fortnight.

Within one particular experiment, scientists managed to teach the rats certain sound cues to link to either drink. Interestingly, if the rats given healthy food had heard the sound cue for grape sugar water after already just drinking it, they would not drink any more of it. Meanwhile, the junk food-fed rats responded different to the sound cues.

Even if they had just drank a lot of the grape sugar water, the sound cue for said drink would still somehow make them drink more of it. The same pattern was found for cherry sugar water.
Therefore it would seem that junk food-fed rats responded to sound cues and were unable to comprehend they had just overindulged in something (in this case the flavoured sugar water).

Basically, their natural preference for novelty had vanished and no longer avoided sounds linked to an overfamiliar food or taste, happy to continue indulging on what they were already eating.

This was even apparent for a significant period of time after the rats went back to a healthier diet. In comparison, the healthy rats were found to actually stop responding to the food they had just consumed.

“We know a lot about food and nutrition and what we should be doing, and yet we’re getting fatter and fatter,” Morris says. “Our sort of diet appears to override an animal’s ability to know it’s just eaten something—they’re just eating indiscriminately, if you will.”

Dr Amy Reichelt, lead author of the paper, commented: “As the global obesity epidemic intensifies, advertisements may have a greater effect on people who are overweight and make snacks like chocolate bars harder to resist.”

Obesity crisis worsens as 11-year-old boy reaches 24 stone

England’s childhood obesity epidemic could be much worse than first thought following the publication of alarming NHS statistics which show that seven school children have tipped the scales at over 20 stone. The figures come from the National Child Measurement Programme, an England-wide initiative whereby schoolchildren are weighed and measured twice prior to reaching the age of 12.

The most overweight child in the country has been revealed to be an 11-year-old boy from Manchester, who at 4ft 4in was found to weigh a staggering 23 stone 11lb in 2011-2012, meaning the boy’s Body Mass Index (BMI) was 84.2.

To put this into perspective; this is approximately twice the weight of a healthy male who is 5ft 10in tall and you are in fact medically classified as obese with a BMI reading of between 30 and 35.

Anybody with a BMI of over 40 is deemed ‘morbidly obese’ and is 80 times more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than someone of a normal weight and you are also likely to lose 10 years off your lifespan.

However, prior to this discovery, a 10-year-old girl from Hounslow, West London, was one of many school children measured and weighed during 2006-2007 for the government’s yearly weigh-in of all year-six pupils. The girl was 4ft 10in tall and weighed in at 24 stone 5lb.

Between 2006 and 2012, there were a total of seven children who weight more than 127kg (20 stone). This included an 11-year-old girl from Bolton, Greater Manchester, whose weight was recorded at 22 stone 11lb during 2012-2012, giving her a BMI of 69. A few years before this in 2007-2008, a 10-year-old boy from Wandsworth, South-West London, weighed 21 stone 10lb and had a BMI of 79.

According to a study published in June conducted by Imperial College London, the number of children admitted to hospital due to obesity-related health problems has shot-up more than four-fold in the last decade, and it seems the problem could spiral out of control unless an urgent intervention is made. Asthma, diabetes and sleeping difficulties are all on the rise because of obesity.

Moreover, statistics from the National Child Measurement Programme show that around one in 10 children are obese when they begin primary school and a third are obese by the time they come to leave, and obesity rates for children in the UK are the highest in Western Europe. Also, it seems that rates are significantly higher in the more deprived communities around the country.

Professor Mitch Blair, of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, spoke to the Sunday Times and said: “Being severely overweight at such a young age has clear physical health implications including a higher risk of diabetes, heart disease and joint problems. In addition there can be serious psychological repercussions. Teenage years are tough enough without the extra burden of being obese.”

Tam Fry, spokesman for the National Obesity Forum, commented: “We have come to accept that 26 per cent of adults in the UK are obese. But we should be outraged that 20 per cent of children are too…We are waiting for children to get fat and then doing something about it. What we should be doing is monitoring them, so before they get fat we have already started to sort them out.”

Australia’s obesity rates are on the rise

The UK and U.S. are two of the most obvious nations that spring to mind associated with the words: ‘obesity crisis’. However, there are numerous other countries in the developed world that are also apparently fighting a battle against the bulge.

The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Reform Council has today released its fourth report on the National Healthcare Agreement, showing that although smoking rates appear to be slightly improving, there are a ‘staggering’ number of Australians who are now overweight or obese.

According to statistics within the report, during the period 2011-12, a shocking 63% of Australians were either overweight or obese. This figure had risen by 2% from the four years prior to this. In total, it was determined 35% of the population were overweight and 28% were obese. Moreover, 7.6% of children in Australia were deemed obese, with an extra 17.7% being overweight.

According to NHS definitions, you are overweight if you have a body mass index (BMI) that is between 25 and 29. A BMI of between 30 and 40, results in an ‘obese’ classification.  Obesity levels for the whole of the UK could be comparable after a survey published in 2012 discovered that approximately just over a quarter of all adults (26%) in England are classified as obese. In addition, around 61.3% of adults in England either overweight or obese and 30% of children aged between 2 and 15. All statistics for England appear to roughly match those found in the new Australian report.

The COAG chairman John Brumby, was dismayed by Australia’s weight problem, saying: “It’s concerning to see that so many Australians are overweight or obese.”

The report has also urged the government to start taking the issue of obesity more seriously and take steps to tackle the problem, “but the fact that the situation is getting worse suggests that it needs urgent attention from our governments to prevent flow-on effects across the system. The news here is something that should be of concern to us all and concern to policy makers across Australia. We all know that obesity is contributing to the burden of chronic disease in Australia. It affects individuals, it affects workplaces, it affects productivity,” says Brumby.

The findings were not all doom and gloom however, and Brumby was clearly delighted with what he described as the ‘stand out result’ – a sustained decline in Australia’s national daily smoking rate in 2011-12 to 16.5%.

In 2007-08 this figure stood at 19.1% and in 1989-90 it was 28.4%, so progress is gradually being made and the number is slowly moving towards COAG’s aim of just 10% by the year 2018.

Obesity levels could skyrocket in the U.S. and UK by 2030

The United States of America is a nation that has long been associated as suffering with weight issues. ‘Obesity’ is a term used to describe somebody who has a body mass index (BMI) of over 30, and it seems many Americans are going above and beyond this number. Environmental, social and cultural factors have been cited by many as being the causes for the obesity epidemic. Typically American’s favourite foods tend to be high in fat and/or sugar and include unhealthy options such as hamburgers, hotdogs, doughnuts and French fries. Some argue that traditional family meal times have been lost in recent years as households become preoccupied with other activities and opt instead to snack on unhealthy treats throughout the day.

Of course these are just a few of the reasons for the obesity crisis in the U.S. that in 2008 resulted in some estimates pitting 32.2% of men and 35.5% for women as being obese. Even five years prior to this back in 2003, there were researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who claimed that the medical cost attributed to obesity-related conditions stood at a staggering $75 billion.
This was all way before the current day though. Fast forward to today and new predictions have been released that show the U.S. is fatter than ever, and will be getting much, much fatter. So much so that by 2030 half of adults could be classified as obese. This is according to a report released on Tuesday by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, who warn that if Americans continue with their poor eating and exercise habits then their weight will continue to soar.

More recent data shows that 35.7% of adults and 16.9% of children aged 2 to 19 are obese in the U.S., as confirmed by the CDC earlier in the year. However the forecasts by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, paint a much bleaker outlook than the government’s first prediction of a 42% obesity level by 2030. The former decided to thoroughly analyse government figures for 39 of the 50 states and found that in every state, the obesity rate will hit 44% by 2030. In 13 states however, it would be at least 60%.

Even the ‘thinnest’ current U.S. state, Colorado, is not going to fare very well in the future. Currently about a fifth of the people in Colorado are obese, but this could surge to 45% if current trends continue. Two major states in New York and California currently have an obesity rate of just 25% and 24% respectively. In 18 years’ time though, these numbers could be bumped up to 51% and 47%.

All of these statistics may not mean much to people reading them, but if you do happen to have a BMI over 30 (from anywhere around the World, not just America), perhaps it is worth considering the detrimental impact that the extra weight is having to your health and will do so even worse in the future. In fact these latest predictions say that in the next two decades, there may be 7.9 million new cases of diabetes a year in comparison to the current 1.9 million and 6.8 million new cases of chronic heart disease compared to 1.3 million presently.

However it is not just the U.S. that needs to think about ways to stop this from happening in the future. Indeed the problem is one that is also escalating closer to home. Over the last thirty years, the UK rate of obesity has spiralled fourfold. In 1980 it was estimated that 6% of males were obese and 8% of females were. In 2009 this had jumped up to 22% for males and 24% for females.

One study conducted by the National Audit Service found that obesity is draining the NHS of roughly £500 million each year and the economy of £2 billion every year in lost productivity, and the problem looks to be getting worse. Experts say that in 10 to 15 years’ time, three-quarters of the UK population will feel the repercussions of ill-health from extra weight. Obesity is clearly a global problem that should be taken into account by everybody and acted upon today to prevent the dark predictions for the future. The following table shows the scale of the problem that has been growing in recent years:

Country	Adult obesity prevalence rate (%)	Year estimated
Tonga	56	2000
Kiribati	51	2006
Saudi Arabia	36	2000
United States	34	2006
United Arab Emirates	34	2000
Egypt	30	2006
Kuwait	29	2000
New Zealand	27	2007
Seychelles	25	2004
Fiji	24	2004
Mexico	24	2000
Canada	23	2004
Israel	23	2001
United Kingdom	23	2002
Greece	23	2003

Medical Specialists Pharmacy believe the UK coalition government need to take both the U.S. AND UK warnings on obesity very seriously and implement effective preventative measures and policies to promote numerous things such as healthier eating, increased exercise, and the major health benefits that can be had from the maintaining of a healthy weight. Encouraging all of these from an early age would be most ideal, with the responsibility of parents now to drum a healthy mentality into the minds of their children so this hopefully continues well into their adult years.

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