governments around the world are beginning to panic

A speaker at the Dieticians Association of Australia conference which is taking place in Darwin said that the way things were going meant that in the future practically everybody would be obese! Dr John Foreyt said that while he had based his conclusions on looking at statistics from America it was likely that the rest of the globe could follow suit.

He said that nations which were highly developed and had a proliferation of fast food restaurants and easy access to unhealthy foodstuffs were suffering from a chronic obesity problem. It is interesting to observe that Australia which once portrayed itself to the world as full of healthy and strong people was now arguably as obese as America. It is estimated that the number of obese people in Australia has in fact doubled over the last 2 decades and some statistics show that the Australian people are in fact fatter than the American people.

Dr Foreyt’s research showed that if things continued in the same way almost 2/3 of Australian people would be classified as obese by the year 2040 and that by the end of the century that statistic would be 100 percent.  Dr Foreyt who is a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine based in Houston, Texas argued that unless serious measures were undertaken to stop the growth of obesity in developed nations the trend would continue. Obesity figures also seem to rise exponentially as people begin to perceive it as normal to be very overweight.

We have seen that many governments around the world are beginning to panic about their obesity problems not because of the great concern about the individuals themselves but because of the huge burden that it is placing on finances. Health care costs related to obesity have shot up as well as productivity losses due to absenteeism at work.

At Ukmedix News we have consistently argued that governments who spend money in tackling obesity are actually investing in the future of their countries and should expect a financial return on their investments.