Fighting obesity - Junk food is as dangerous as tobacco

IT took millions of deaths and decades of campaigning before the western world realised it had no alternative but to confront the tobacco giants to reduce the spiralling death toll caused by smoking and the costs it imposed on national health services.

Despite this huge shift in consciousness, tobacco lobbyists ignored ever-stronger scientific evidence of the catastrophic effect smoking had on individuals and those who shared smokers’ living or working space.

For too long, the tobacco industry won the cultural war by depicting their opponents as ill-informed do-gooders. The industry spent, in today’s terms if not in the terms of the day, billions in sponsorship, advertising and product placement to try to sell more tobacco. It ruthlessly used its vast resources to turn more and more people into smokers, despite knowing the likelihood of causing fatal illnesses. They still do this right across Asia, Africa and in South America as if their new customers were any less susceptible to tobacco illnesses than we are.

They demeaned and slandered those who did no more than tell the truth about their lethal products. The industry and their apologists told the most appalling lies about smoking and what nicotine addiction can do to a person’s health and sense of well being. They did this until their products were banned in public spaces, work places, until tobacco advertising was banned and until governments put the health of their citizens before the profits of the tobacco conglomerates.

Is it possible that we are approaching such a moment of clarity on obesity and the foods that cause it?

There seems to be an almost weekly report on obesity now, one more damning than the other.

Just yesterday, a Swedish report revealed that pregnant women who are obese put their children at higher risk of developing asthma compared with mothers of normal weight.

More than 129,000 mothers in Stockholm and their 189,000 children were assessed and researchers found that mothers who were very obese, or with a body mass index of 35 and over, had a 61% increased risk of their children developing asthma between eight and ten years of age.

Earlier this year, the National Adult Nutrition Survey warned that obesity in men has tripled in just two decades. The survey found that obesity in men went up from 8% in 1990 to 26% today. It has also risen in women, up from 13% to 21%.

We can pretend all we like, we can talk about sedentary lifestyles and children who don’t develop good eating or exercise habits, but the reality is that so much of the food we regard as everyday is causing what has been described as the greatest threat to health in the western world. We eat far too much junk food and will pay a terrible price. Individuals can only do so much and it is time that government adopted the same policies on dangerous foods as it did on smoking.

After all, the principles and the consequences are the same.