UK Edition
British people will be fattest in Europe by 2025
Britain will be the fat man of Europe within a decade after the largest ever obesity study found that almost four in 10 people will be dangerously overweight by 2025.
For the first time there are more obese people than underweight people in the world as bad diets and lack of exercise combine to create an unstoppable health time-bomb.
Health experts said the crisis in Britain was now a ‘national tragedy’ and blamed the government for failing to bring in higher taxes on sugary foods and drinks.
Researchers at Imperial College London said the true health impact of poor lifestyles was being masked in the UK by statins and beta-blockers which lower blood pressure and cut cholesterol and are now taken by millions of older people.
But they warned that within ten years so many people will be severely obese that such drugs will stop working and surgery will be the only option to prevent disease and early death.
Britain already has some of the worst obesity levels in Europe, with the third highest average BMI (Body Mass Index) for women and the tenth highest for men. Only Malta and Turkey currently have more obese people.
But the new figures show that within the years Britain will have the highest proportion of fat women in Europe followed by Ireland (37 per cent) and Malta (34 per cent) and the most fat men along with Ireland and then Lithuania (36 per cent).
Professor Majid Ezzati, the senior author of the study from the School of Public Health at Imperial, said: “This epidemic of severe obesity is too extensive to be tackled with medications such as blood pressure lowering drugs or diabetes treatments alone, or with a few extra bike lanes.
“Our research has shown that over 40 years we have transitioned from a world in which underweight prevalence was more than double that of obesity, to one in which more people are obese than underweight.
“Obesity has reached crisis point. We need coordinated global initiatives – such as looking at the price of healthy food compared to unhealthy food, or taxing high sugar and highly processed foods - to tackle this crisis.
“Unless we make healthy food options like fresh fruits and vegetables affordable for everyone, and increase the price of unhealthy processed foods, the situation is unlikely to change.”
In the most comprehensive review of obesity ever undertaken, which was published in The Lancet, Imperial researchers pooled analysis from 1698 population-based studies, with more than 19 million participants representing 99 per cent of countries in the world.
In 1975 the average Briton had a BMI of 23, which is considered a healthy weight. But today that has risen to 27, with the average person now overweight. It means that since the 1970s, every person in Briton has roughly gained more than three pounds (1.5kg) per decade.
In the past 40 years there has been a huge rise in the numbers of people that are obese rising from 105 million in 1975 to 641 million in 2014, with almost a fifth living in just six high-income English-speaking countries—Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK, and USA.
Obesity currently costs the health service £47 billion a year, just under half the entire NHS budget.
Ten types of cancer are linked to excess weight which can also lead to Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke and a range of other health problems. Cancer Research UK predicts that obesity related cancer will rise 45 per cent in the next two decades, causing 700,000 new cases of cancer.
Tam Fry, of the National Obesity Forum, said "I fear that it is very probable that the researchers’ predictions for 2025 will come true.
“For the UK, obesity will not just be a ' national emergency ', as it has recently been dubbed, but a national tragedy if the current government's indifference to stemming it is not quickly reversed.
“The researchers focus on a sugar tax being a must if any impact on their figures is to be made and are just as correct in their view that the tax must include excessive sugary food as well as fizzy drinks.
“To be really effective, however, the tax needs to be much greater than the 20 per cent the Chancellor is considering ."
Island nations in Polynesia and Micronesia were found to have the highest average BMI in the world. In Polynesia and Micronesia more than 38 per cent of men and over half of women are already obese.
Timor-Leste, Ethiopia, and Eritrea have the lowest average BMI in the world.
Professor George Davey Smith from the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit, School of Social and Community Medicine, Bristol, UK said that tackling the obesity crisis could harm some of the world’s poorest countries.
“A focus on obesity at the expense of recognition of the substantial remaining burden of under-nutrition threatens to divert resources away from disorders that affect the poor to those that are more likely to affect the wealthier in low income countries.”
Jamie Blackshaw, National lead for Obesity and Healthy Weight, Public Health England, said: “The causes of obesity are complex and the environment we live in encourages poor diets and low levels of physical activity.
“There is no single solution, we have to address the many factors that drive up obesity levels. We all – government, industry, local authorities and the public – have a role to play in that.
"That’s why we’re supporting the government to develop its childhood obesity strategy, we’re running the world’s first national diabetes prevention programme, and we’re currently piloting, with local councils and Leeds Beckett University, a whole systems approach to tackling obesity.”