Obesity is 'deadlier than smoking' and can knock 13 years off your life

...
Your health can only be improved by movement and moderation.
...
Equating weight loss, instead of lifestyle changes, with improved health is "like saying 'whiter teeth produced by the elimination of smoking reduces the incidence of lung cancer,'" argues J. Eric Oliver, author of Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America's Obesity Epidemic. Even a group of CDC researchers admit that "evidence that weight loss improves survival is limited."
...
There is no talk of what Buddhists describe as "the middle path," no discussion of the pleasure of walking, eating homemade food, slowing down.
...
It is not fat itself that is unhealthy, but our hypocritical attitudes and compulsive behaviors that are. We drive two blocks to the grocery store and then spend 20 minutes circling the parking lot so we can get a close spot. Once inside we load up our carts with low-fat, microwave meals and diet shakes filled with artificial everything.
...
We just need to leave our cars in the garage, stroll down to the park, and play some softball with our neighbors on a Saturday. We just need to enjoy every last bite of our home-baked birthday cakes, then have some oatmeal for breakfast the next morning.

But modern life - with the easy availability of cheap unhealthy food and families relying on their cars - means it is almost impossible for many to avoid putting on weight.
...
"We live in a consumer society which encourages us to eat. We have a sedentary lifestyle. It's an environment which means that if we just behave normally we will become obese.
...
Pointing out that the design of many towns and cities is based around the needs of the car, it suggests more should be done to ensure that it is easier to walk and cycle to encourage residents to take more exercise.

Sugary and fatty foods are much cheaper than they used to be, but the cost of fresh fruit and vegetables has actually risen over the past 15 years.
...
"It's time for the Government to prioritise public health. If it doesn't, the human and financial cost on society and the NHS will escalate out of control."

In the past 30 years, physical activity has declined significantly in the UK.

Between 1975 and 2003, the average distance per year each person in England walked fell from 255 miles to 192 miles.

Over the same period, distances cycled fell from an average of 51 miles per person per year to 34 miles.

Car use, meanwhile, increased by more than 10 per cent. A fifth of all journeys of less than a mile are now made by car.

Obesity, the authors concluded, was an inevitable consequence of a society in which energy-dense, cheap foods, labour-saving devices, motorised transport and sedentary work were rife.
...
From planning our towns to encourage more physical activity to placing more pressure on mothers to breast feed - believed to slow down infant weight gain - the report highlighted a range of policy options without making any concrete recommendations.

Industry was already working to put healthier products on the shelf, the report noted, while work was advanced in transforming the very make-up of food so it was digested more slowly and proved satisfying for longer.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7047244.stm

... the basis on which the government’s Foresight report has been produced is questionable. The authors assume that obesity is caused by an imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended. But as the Australian writers Michael Gard and Jan Wright point out, researchers have struggled to confirm this thesis. It might be true - but studies looking for an increase in calories consumed have tended to find that we’re actually eating less than in the past, while studies looking to confirm we take less exercise have also been inconclusive. Yes, it’s true we have many labour-saving devices and transport options now - but there are also many more options for physical activity, too. Women, in particular, would have been strongly discouraged from taking part in sport 50 years ago but now are as likely to be active as men.

Nor has the world of work changed as much people assume. In the past, only a quite small proportion of the population spent their days as miners or road diggers - most people had sedentary jobs back then, too. The kinds of jobs we do may have changed, but the energy involved may not. There is little reason to assume that manning a station on a production line, for example, was any more energetic than filling shelves in a supermarket or flipping burgers. Oh, and people may not have noticed, but despite all their physical activity, poor manual labourers have always tended to die at a younger age than double-chinned, deskbound bank managers.

Our scepticism should be further increased by the fact that the forecasts in the report are based on computer models. Such models have a laughable track record in relation to major health problems in the UK. Remember when millions of people were going to die from AIDS? Or when hundreds of thousands were going to die from variant-Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (vCJD)? In truth, the numbers of deaths were a fraction of those predicted by the models. We should be very wary of taking models seriously in such circumstances.

Thirdly, there is the assumption that ‘obesity equals disease’. But on closer inspection, people in the ‘overweight’ or even the ‘mildly obese’ categories have broadly similar health outcomes to people in the ‘ideal’ weight range. And what are all these fat people going to be treated for? It would appear that cases of type-2 diabetes will rise, but the major diseases said to be caused by obesity are cardio-vascular disease and cancer: the things that are already killing most people, but for which mortality rates have been falling. The worst-case scenario is that, if we become obese, these diseases might get us a little bit quicker than they would have done anyway. How will that put an extra strain on health services?

Finally, the report is pretty damning in one respect: despite suggesting that there is a need for a national, we’re-in-this-together approach to tackling the problem of obesity and exercise, there is no proof whatsoever that government intervention in these areas has a positive effect – a fact that the report admits. Today, there is ubiquitous advice to ‘eat healthily’ or ‘be more active’. There is pressure from government, the media and society generally to get thin and get moving, with the message that being fat is going to kill you. And yet in Britain, as in many other countries around the world, people are still getting fatter.

Secondly, the basis on which the government’s Foresight report has been produced is questionable. The authors assume that obesity is caused by an imbalance between calories consumed and calories expended. But as the Australian writers Michael Gard and Jan Wright point out, researchers have struggled to confirm this thesis. It might be true - but studies looking for an increase in calories consumed have tended to find that we’re actually eating less than in the past, while studies looking to confirm we take less exercise have also been inconclusive. Yes, it’s true we have many labour-saving devices and transport options now - but there are also many more options for physical activity, too. Women, in particular, would have been strongly discouraged from taking part in sport 50 years ago but now are as likely to be active as men.

Nor has the world of work changed as much people assume. In the past, only a quite small proportion of the population spent their days as miners or road diggers - most people had sedentary jobs back then, too. The kinds of jobs we do may have changed, but the energy involved may not. There is little reason to assume that manning a station on a production line, for example, was any more energetic than filling shelves in a supermarket or flipping burgers. Oh, and people may not have noticed, but despite all their physical activity, poor manual labourers have always tended to die at a younger age than double-chinned, deskbound bank managers.

Our scepticism should be further increased by the fact that the forecasts in the report are based on computer models. Such models have a laughable track record in relation to major health problems in the UK. Remember when millions of people were going to die from AIDS? Or when hundreds of thousands were going to die from variant-Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (vCJD)? In truth, the numbers of deaths were a fraction of those predicted by the models. We should be very wary of taking models seriously in such circumstances.

Thirdly, there is the assumption that ‘obesity equals disease’. But on closer inspection, people in the ‘overweight’ or even the ‘mildly obese’ categories have broadly similar health outcomes to people in the ‘ideal’ weight range. And what are all these fat people going to be treated for? It would appear that cases of type-2 diabetes will rise, but the major diseases said to be caused by obesity are cardio-vascular disease and cancer: the things that are already killing most people, but for which mortality rates have been falling. The worst-case scenario is that, if we become obese, these diseases might get us a little bit quicker than they would have done anyway. How will that put an extra strain on health services?

Finally, the report is pretty damning in one respect: despite suggesting that there is a need for a national, we’re-in-this-together approach to tackling the problem of obesity and exercise, there is no proof whatsoever that government intervention in these areas has a positive effect – a fact that the report admits. Today, there is ubiquitous advice to ‘eat healthily’ or ‘be more active’. There is pressure from government, the media and society generally to get thin and get moving, with the message that being fat is going to kill you. And yet in Britain, as in many other countries around the world, people are still getting fatter.