Saturday, February 6, 2016

Nagging adults about their weight won’t solve the obesity crisis – teaching children about nutrition might

It will take a decade to change attitudes to food, and cooking has to be a central part of the school day, with compulsory school meals that pupils help to prepare

The NHS is going bust and hospitals, facing a £2.2bn overspend this year, have been told they have no option but to balance their books. Radical cuts will be implemented, and staffing levels will suffer.

The people who will notice the difference in service will be the patients – the people who pay for the NHS in the first place. Experts agree that the NHS is “full of waste”; this week a report reckoned that £1bn could be saved annually by releasing patients who are fit earlier, freeing up to 5,500 beds a day. This proposal is like shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic: bed-blockers have got to go somewhere – residential or outpatient care or rehabilitation, or supported care in their own homes – and who is going to pay for that? Home-care visits are already so short that there’s no time for more than a wash and a wipe, and no chat.

One way of saving money would be to disband pointless quangos like the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), which regularly comes up with inane suggestions about how to improve the nation’s health. It would like GPs to get paid for encouraging patients with a body mass index (BMI) in the obese range to attend Weight Watchers and be offered advice about a healthier lifestyle. This morbid obsession with targeting the nation’s fatties is doomed. Being large does not necessarily mean you are unfit.

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