AIBU - With this new data on obesity and the NHS is it time to have some honest and difficult conversations?

[IAmADancer]

New data from a ‘landmark study’ has show that obesity costs the NHS around 14billion a year and that 2 out of 3 adults are obese.

I know this is a difficult subject but the numbers are pretty clear. With the cost of living crisis and a general requirement for both parents to work now to support themselves how do we support people to make the right choices and tackle a growing problem?

Im really interested to hear people’s opinions on what we can do with such stark figures laid bare.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/17/cost-of-obesity-twice-those-who-are-healthy-nhs/

@Sissynova I thought the same. But that linked study took those factors into account. It's very good

The solution is education. Ultra processed food should be treated like cigarettes. Crisps, soft drinks white bread, etc. People need to learn that these don't provide any nutrition. Adverts of these foods should be banned. Plain packaging, etc.

The biggest prevention of obesity is not over-feeding and under-exercising your kids.

You can talk all you want about the milk they received when they were babies, but again the key is to feed them healthily and make sure they have a good amount of exercise for all the years past the relatively short milk stage.

Spreads, sauces and oils are the killers.

Olive oil whilst being a healthy fat, 120 cals per table spoon...

I never believe anyone that claims they can't lose weight when they believe they're in a calorie deficit.

But BMI was never meant to be used on an individual basis. Nor in relation to health. And even discounting the muscles mass disparities, it is massively racist. It was formed using the bodies of white European men only.

And other thing your diet is bad you would need to spend several everyday at the gym to burn the calories. And people said before it mess up your gut microbiome so much that will more and more junk food. Exercise is good but alone it won't solve the obesity crisis.
It's like the plastic crisis. There is too much money in junk food for the governments to stop it being sold even though it is literally killing people.

The trouble with taxing “bad” foods is who decides what’s bad and what’s good?

Do we trust those who make these decisions to not get into bed with big grain corporations as already happens?
Do we trust the people telling us that butter is bad but margarine is good?
Do we trust those that brought us the eatwell plate?

Same for me. Am bedridden now, size 12 to size 24. Meds increase my appetite too.

Read this last week:

”We are surrounded by a society that encourages fatphobic beliefs. Fat people have been wrongly blamed for the failings of our NHS and publicly humiliated on TV via shows like You Are What You Eat and the Biggest Loser. It is our responsibility to challenge those beliefs within us, and have compassion and empathy for our fat friends, family members, strangers, and our fat selves.

In his book Food Isn’t Medicine, Dr Joshua Wolrich argues that the narrative that fat people simply have less willpower than thin people and are therefore morally inferior is scientifically incorrect and has hurt fat people for generations. Healthcare tends to follow a weight-normative approach where a focus of weight and weight loss is used to define health and wellbeing. This discriminates against those who don’t fit its narrow definition. The link between health and weight is nowhere near as straightforward as people and many healthcare providers make it out to be and we should be acknowledging the harmful impacts of weight stigma, an example of which is your attitude towards your father.

Studies show that if we are fat, being shamed and bullied does not make us healthier. Quite the reverse; it harms us.

You are not alone in your fatphobic opinion. Most of us could stand to do some thinking about the way society has demonised fat people and how that has influenced our personal beliefs.”

Dont blame individuals, blame this government for refusing to regulate the food industry, levy taxes on sugar, and restrict the use of sugar and salt as preservatives and sweeteners in canned and bottled food and drink. We reduced smoking with legislation, why can't we do the same for obesity.

I understand what you’re saying, and of course that’s important, but I don’t understand why you’re keen to disregard a good quality study?

If breastfeeding makes a difference it makes a difference.
If formula milk is a UPF it’s a UPF, should we not be finding a better approach to encouraging women to breastfeed?
Obviously fed is best, but you can’t ignore it if it contributes to a wider problem on a societal level.

I am am a bit overweight myself but have worked carefully, all my adult life, to keep it under control. I think it is time we educated people properly like my mum did with me. It was just common sense. No dieting.....just sensible eating. I became a healthy adult and so did my husband. The kids were brought up to eat fruit instead of sweet snacks but these were not actually forbidden. Moderation was the key. We married young and had little money but our meals were nutritionally balanced... cereal for breakfast, sandwhich and fruit for lunch and baked potatoes, baked beans on toast, omelettes etc for tea. No chip or frying pan but oven chips did sneak in and still do. On payday it was chicken and three veg or fray bentos pie and mash with peas. On Sundays we went to mum-in-laws for full works. I was a student nurse so I got plenty of exercise....mostly on the wards in those days. As time went on we ate much more varied meals.
We need to stop treating people who are overweight as though there is nothing wrong with it. It is not child abuse to keep your children fit and a healthy weight.

Just to be clear and bedridden due to the illness I have, not obesity. I am so ashamed of my weight.

There have been countless tv shows that have done it. They manage to force people to lose weight, pretty much breaking them psychologically in the process and never actually manage to maintain it.

My parents were fit and healthy. We ate the same foods, all home cooked and I piled on weight despite eating healthy food and being active. My body shape is completely different as well. Even before I was overweight my legs were so muscular that I never looked slim

@PtarmisanCheese You're right. It's scandalous. Women's health isn't taken seriously. It never has been. And, as I said, I am very sympathetic to those who have genuine medical problems. But if 2 out of 3 people are obese, most of those won't be obese because of problems with their health. And I'm not buying into the stress aspect, either. There was an awful lot of stress during WW2 - both for the adults and for the children. There wasn't anything like the numbers of obese people then - rich or poor.

The Minnesota Starvation Experiment was a good example of this.

Because the “support” on offer gives out crap advice. My support was suggestion to join slimming world, I put on weight, ditched slimming world and went for high protein, no sugar intermittent fasting and lost a ton of weight. I was soo sooo happy I’d finally managed it before discovering I had Graves’ disease and I’d only lost weight because of my metabolism being in Uber drive , when it swung to hashimotos and my thyroid tanked when I was eating the same food I had been losing weight with and I piled it on and more.

the next support was an obese dietician practically throwing a diet planner at me full of foods I was allergic to and telling me to figure it out myself. The food plan included 3 meals (which automatically is too much for me and I will gain weight, plus high carbs ton of fruit, lots of processed foods and low fat crap. It wasn’t usable. I eat healthier than that!

It was actually worse than no support at all,

But @SpringTime2020 wanted more than 12 weeks so must have felt that the support was good, just wanted more.

You probably need more specialised advice in view of Graves' Disease which is completely different to the poster I quoted.

Specialist advice from where? It’s not on offer.

m the 12 week course was the diet folder and weekly weigh ins an hour drive away from the house during working hours.

you don’t get offered anything else until you’ve done the folder, and if the folder advice doesn’t help they blame you, not the fact the advice was out of date 40 years ago.

given they’ve so far been unable to treat someone with both conditions, they don’t understand how it’s possible, they certainly don’t understand what I should be eating to lose weight.

I understand what you’re saying, and of course that’s important, but I don’t understand why you’re keen to disregard a good quality study?

I'm not disregarding it, what I'm saying is it's neither here nor there if we're going to make our children overweight once we wean them.

As I said, breast or formula feed doesn't matter if the children are over-fed and under-exercised.

Parents make their children fat past the milk stage by doing this.

There was an awful lot of stress during WW2 - both for the adults and for the children. There wasn't anything like the numbers of obese people then - rich or poor.

Like I’ve said before, there isn’t a reasonable comparison here.
In the 1940s people were rationed, but still eating real food. The stress they suffered was different to now. They had very real, life threatening situations, but in between these times they still had carefree normal times and life went on.
We are living in an era of constant, unnecessary, non life threatening stress, exacerbated by school, work, social media, high social pressures, and our brains and bodies can’t cope with it. There’s no return to normality in between the stress, it’s just constant. And now we have so much food that serves as an emotional outlet, greedy marketeers rubbing their hands together because humans are behaving like humans, the government and NHS prioritise money over caring about people’s health and well-being, and here we are.
Life is too different now, 80 years on, for there to be any meaningful comparison between now and then.

We ate the same foods, all home cooked and I piled on weight despite eating healthy food and being active.

Then you were being over-fed and you weren't active enough for the calories you were consuming.

Unless you had an undiagnosed medical problem of course.

It would be lovely if we could have a discussion without any of the defensiveness and unpleasantness that happens on threads like these. Until society can talk about obesity and overweight without people feeling it's a personal attack then I can't see us getting anywhere in tacking the issue.

Obesity doesn't happen quickly. It takes years. What's going on in those years and why aren't people able or willing to say to themselves that they are putting on weight and need to reign it in? i think we fear the word fat and obese when used to describe ourselves or loved ones. I overheard my sister telling my mum that my niece is overweight. She's obese. Harsh as that is, it's true. Minimising things by our use of language isn't helping anyone. We need to be honest and take the emotion out of it.

But if bottlefeeding sets more children up to be obese in childhood, as the studies show, this should be included in any advice to prevent obesity.
Of course some children are made fat after the milk stage, but research shows that bottle fed babies are statistically more likely to be, why not start right at the beginning of their lives to encourage parents from the word go?
I really don’t understand the point you’re making with this, when encouraging more women to breastfeed their babies could have a significant effect on childhood obesity.

Well lots of women are encouraged to breastfeed but it's not a magic liquid that's going to prevent obesity, if they're overfed past weaning.

I don't know what the answer is really. Women have the right to choose breastfeed or formula feed, and parents have the right to overfeed and under-exercise their kids.

Hardly a day goes by where you don't read a MNetter suggesting someone 'packs lots of snacks to occupy their child', if they have an appointment or long journey. Not to mention kids being met at the school gates with a snack for the short journey home.

These are just some of the attitudes that need to change in order to tackle child obesity.