What the commentators said

Obesity is a problem inextricably linked to poverty, said Sarah Boseley in The Guardian. People with little money all too often “buy cheap, filling food that is high in fat, salt and sugar”; they also tend to live in areas where there are more takeaway chicken shops than greengrocers. But the problem isn’t confined to the poorer sections of society, said Mark Porter in The Times. The past 30 years have seen a steady rise in obesity across the social spectrum. This is partly down to people’s carb-heavy diets and the greater availability of fatty and sugary foods; and partly due to the fact that doctors like me lack the resources to help patients, and so skirt the issue. No one denies the severity of the problem, said Max Pemberton in the Daily Mail. Obesity causes 900,000 hospital admissions a year and costs the NHS £6.1bn. Successive governments have vowed to tackle it, but the problem only gets worse. And now comes Boris Johnson declaring yet another war on obesity. Yet he says nothing here I haven’t heard before: the only difference with his war is that “it’s personal”; the PM himself is “leading the charge”. I’m afraid it’s time to accept the “painful truth”: this isn’t a problem the state can fix. It’s down to individuals.

But one thing the Government could do, said Mark Wallace in the I newspaper, is to stop sending out mixed messages. One week, it’s telling us to “eat out to help out” struggling eateries; the next, it’s forcing them to add calorie counts to menus and banning two-for-one deals on snacks. The only effect of such nannying is to make it harder for restaurants, pubs and cafés to survive. Any “quick fixes” are indeed doomed to fail, said Rosa Prince in The Daily Telegraph. What’s needed is a fundamental change in attitudes. We should be teaching children to cook at school, paying farmers properly to grow fruit and veg, and deterring the spread of fast food joints. Britain’s obesity rate is the sixth highest in the industrialised world; one in five children are overweight before they turn 11. That has to change.