Obesity

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Wednesday 18th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, it is an honour and a pleasure not only to have been one of the noble Baroness’s supporters last week, but to be following her now. Like many women in this country, I feel I have been following her for most of my life. The noble Baroness no doubt feels that her younger self—founding Spare Rib aged 21—would have been amazed to see herself here today. Well, I can assure her that my 16 year-old self, in awe of her many achievements, would have been far more astonished at the thought of being here with her today.

The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, has had an extraordinary and wide-ranging career to date, from 1970s feminist, newspaper editor, writer, farmer to chair of the London Food Board and fearless campaigner on many other issues. As she starts yet another new career, all of these experiences will have given her skills and expertise which will significantly enhance our deliberations, not least in the fields of women’s rights, food and obesity, which we debate today, and I look forward to continuing working with her on many of these vital topics.

My noble friend Lord McColl and I share an office. Tackling obesity has become a shared passion, which we discuss regularly, and I am grateful to him for giving us the opportunity to open up our daily conversation to the Chamber today.

May I start by congratulating the Government on chapter 2 of the childhood obesity plan? As the introduction says,

“Childhood obesity is one of the biggest health problems this country faces”.


It also acknowledges that it is a social justice issue disproportionately affecting children in low-income households in the more deprived areas. The plan makes a good start, and I look forward to the consultation. But I am aware, from the challenges of chairing the Centre for Social Justice’s childhood obesity report Off the Scales last year, that keeping food campaigners and the food industry in the same room is not easy.

Last month, I stumbled across a BBC programme “The Big Crash Diet Experiment”, which took four obese people with serious weight-related health issues—fatty liver disease, heart problems and type 2 diabetes—and, under medical supervision, put them on a nine-week 800-calorie-a-day regime. The presenter, a doctor, was sceptical at the start, like many of us viewers. The programme included interviews with a number of medical experts, including former government obesity adviser Professor Susan Jebb. The results were immediate and dramatic. All four volunteers lost a considerable amount of weight—to the extent that they changed shape before our eyes. Overall, there was 20% less of Father Paul, and his diabetes went into remission; Rebecca lost nearly three stone; Yolande’s liver fat was reduced by a third. I know that ITV has also recently shown a similar programme with similar results.

Curious to know more, I got in touch with Professor Roy Taylor, from Newcastle University, who also featured in the show. He told me that the current position is exciting. It is now accepted by all UK diabetes specialists that type 2 diabetes is a potentially reversible condition. My noble friend the Minister may be aware that the national clinical director for diabetes and Simon Stevens are actively discussing how to roll this out in the NHS. Last month, the American Diabetes Association changed its official position and recognised for the first time that remission of type 2 diabetes was possible.

Changing long-established beliefs about any medical matter takes time, quite rightly. It is 10 years since the publication of the hypothesis of type 2 diabetes being a simple and reversible state, and it is seven years since publication of the proof that real people could actually achieve this. Early next month, Professor Taylor’s paper describing the mechanisms in liver and pancreas as people achieve remission of diabetes will be published in the internationally leading journal Cell Metabolism.

Noble Lords will not be surprised, however, to hear what his research participants report as the greatest barrier to success. They describe very clearly the personal and social difficulties in maintaining reasonable long-term control of food intake in the current obesogenic environment. Although around one-third report no trouble in avoiding weight regain, the majority—like most of us—have to struggle against our food-centred culture: unthinking acceptance of the notion that eating between meals is okay; unregulated fast food production with high added-sugar content and hence lack of feeling full despite significant calorie intake; and the lack of simple, clear labelling of calorie content. He also said that the argument that voluntary regulation by the food industry might help is flawed. The need for action is eloquently illustrated by the simple fact that the average man and average woman are now over 10 kilograms heavier than in 1980. At a current estimated cost to the NHS of £30 billion a year, this cannot continue. I urge my noble friend to act.