Editor's comment: fast food and slow people

Even dilligent 10,000-a-day steppers should carry out other sports or exercise to look after bones, muscles and balance. Sadly, just one in three men and one in four women are doing the right things, the report by Public Health England, (page 10) reveals.

 

A day earlier PHE told us England’s poorest areas have five times more chip shops and factory chicken shacks than affluent areas. Where I live, you can hardly walk the streets for fear of slipping on a discarded thighbone. In the NHS, hospital beds and even mortuary freezers are supersize. There is talk of renaming a popular TV soap Obese City. 

 

Little wonder that the statistics of mortality and morbidity are chilling. Last year 617,000 hospital admissions were obesity related. 

 

And over 26 per cent of adults are obese – almost double the number of 25 years ago.

 

The CSP is playing its part in getting people moving via its Love Activity, Hate Exercise? campaign but physios, and the rest of the NHS, are frazzled by the burden of obesity. 

 

Local authorities, you have a public health remit, so refuse licenses to outlets that deal in sugar, salt and trans fat, and offer incentives to serve healthy food that young people like.

 

And what about council tax cuts for no-car homes? Free school meals or other incentives – a tie-in with a trainer manufacturer, perhaps – for children who walk to school? Also, those school walks need to be made safer. It’s about the big picture.