Obesity 'default condition' in UK
Updated on 17 October 2007
Britain is sleep-walking its way into an obesity crisis, according to a two-year UK study.
Obesity has become a chronic problem in the UK because the human body is not adapted to modern life, with its labour-saving devices, motorised transport and cheap high-energy foods.
This is the main finding of a report by the government's Foresight think tank. Tackling Obesities: Future Choices, concludes that weight gain has become the "default" condition in modern life and that obesity is inevitable, given our environment and culture.
The report, compiled over two years and with contributions from 250 experts, notes that human beings evolved to survive in times of scarcity, as a result of which our bodies are programmed to store food that they do not need as fat. That fat is then used to provide energy when resources are scarce.
'We don't want to just aim to make inroads by 2020, as the government, suggests, but to see changes by 2010, as they originally promised.'Peter Hollins, British Heart Foundation
But in our present "obesogenic" environment, where supplies of high-energy food are abundant, there is significantly less opportunity to use these accumulated stores of fat, as a result of which we put on weight.
The risks of obesity include type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart failure and cancer.
Meanwhile the British Heart Foundation has today accused the government of moving the goalposts in its strategy for dealing with childhood obesity.
Commenting on the government's decision to adjust its targets for reducing the number of overweight children, BHF Chief Executive Peter Hollins said: "We don't want to just aim to make inroads by 2020, as the government, suggests, but to see changes by 2010, as they originally promised."
The government has announced its intention to reduce the proportion of overweight and obese children to 2000 levels by the year 2020, an apparent softening of its previously stated plan to halve childhood obesity rates by 2010.
