DR David Agus doesn’t sit while talking to me on the phone from his California-based office. “I’m walking around with headphones as we talk,” says Agus, professor of medicine at the University of Southern California (USC) Keck School of Medicine and author of a new book, The End of Illness.

The number of American children having obesity surgery has trebled in recent years, surging at a pace that could mean more than 1,000 such operations this year, research suggests.

The number of US children having obesity surgery has trebled in recent years, surging at a pace that could mean more than 1,000 such operations this year, research published today suggested.