How to beat obesity
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 30 July 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The government says “tackling obesity is one of the greatest long-term health challenges this country faces” and has published a plan to help people in England lose weight. What’s in it, what’s not, and what more could be done?
David Aaronovitch asks the experts:
David Buck is a senior fellow at the health think tank The Kings Fund and used to work for The Department of Health Smitha Mundas is a doctor turned journalist and a health reporter for the BBC Susan Jebb is Professor of Diet and Population Health at the University of Oxford, and a member of the Public Health England Obesity Programme. Professor Corinna Hawkes is Director of the Centre for Food Policy at City University and Vice Chair of the London Child Obesity Task force.
Producers: Ben Crighton, Kirsteen Knight and Joe Kent Studio Manager: James Beard Editor: Jasper Corbett.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:10.9 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David Aronovich. |
| 0:14.2 | You, me, the top experts and 28 minutes to understand the world. |
| 0:18.9 | That's the briefing room. |
| 0:20.4 | This week, the great obesity strategy. |
| 0:23.6 | Will it work? |
| 0:33.6 | A brush with death can change a chap's mind. |
| 0:37.8 | I've always wanted to lose weight for ages and ages. |
| 0:41.3 | And like I think many people I struggle with my way, go up and down. |
| 0:45.0 | But when I went into ICU, when I was really ill, I was very, I was very, I was way over weight. |
| 0:50.2 | You know, I was too fat. |
| 0:51.5 | If not exactly the road, Boris Johnson perhaps travelled the hospital corridor to Damascus. |
| 0:57.7 | The result has been a new interventionist government obesity strategy. |
| 1:02.6 | So what's in it? |
| 1:03.9 | What's not? |
| 1:04.9 | And what more needs to be done to deal with the country's obesity crisis? |
| 1:09.7 | Step inside the briefing room and together we'll find out. |
| 1:15.6 | Before you formulate the best way to tackle a problem, it's a good idea to understand what |
| 1:20.4 | that problem actually is. David Buck used to work for the Department of Health where he |
| 1:25.8 | focused on inequalities. Now he's at the |
| 1:28.5 | Health Policy think tank, the King's Fund. In adults, overweight and obesity are measured by BMI, |
| 1:35.7 | which is body mass index. It's essentially a number, and all it does, it divides an adult's weight |
... |
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