Childhood obesity: time to shrink a parent

Abstract

An observer from another planet might well be confused by the dramatic increase in obesity, and our responses to it, over the past 30 years,1 soaring above the WHO criteria for a nutritional epidemic2 overtaking smoking as the leading cause of Coronary Heart Disease (CHD),3 and committing most of the current generations to chronic ill health and disability. Our interplanetary observer could see how a protracted process of excess fat accumulation leads to multiple organ-specific pathologies, and to vast attributable health-care expenditure. Hence, it is a disease alright, the consequence of gene–environment interactions and long established as ICD-9: 278. It is not to be trivialized as an expression of personal greed and an idle life. Obesity is also observably socially defined, emerging on an epidemic scale, perhaps as an unplanned product of an unregulated free market.4