BRITONS WOULD BE THE WORLD'S FATTEST PEOPLE BY 2025- STUDY SAYS

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.

“For the UK, obesity will be a national tragedy if the current government's indifference to stemming it is not quickly reversed."

Tam Fry, National Obesity Forum

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).

Poor diets and lack of exercise are fuelling the obesity crisis Credit: Alamy /Alamy

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.”