BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.

Age and experience have taught me not to trust miracle cures,

except sometimes one comes along.

New weight loss drugs, known commercially as Wago,, Zempik and Mungaro have been demonstrated

to have a big effect in helping people to lose weight, and in the case of Wigovia

and Mungaro have recently been approved for use in obesity treatment in the NHS in England.

That seems fantastic, an end to obesity in our time.

The problem is, can we afford these drugs without bankrupting the NHS? How badly do we need them? Step into the briefing room and together we'll

find out. First, let's find out what these new drugs are and what they do.

Here with me is John Wilding, Professor of Medicine at the University of Liverpool.

John Wilding, how do we define obese in this country and what proportion of people are obese?

And maybe then you can tell us how that's changed.

Obesity is a complex disease that's associated with an excess amount of body fat.

We've tended to use body mass index, which is your weight in kilograms divided by your height

squared in metres and a body mass index above 30 is generally considered to define obesity, although that has

its limitations because it doesn't tell us about body fat. In this country, if we look at that metric,

about just under 30% of people will be living with obesity and about another 20 to 30% will be overweight, which would be

defined as a body mass index above 25. John, I take it just as there's a difference between

being overweight and obese, there's a difference between being obese and being severely obese.

Yes, that's right. In fact, the WHO gives classification. So a class one obesity, the lowest

would be between a body mass index of 30 and 35, class 2 between 35 and 40, and above 40 would be

class 3 or what we would generally call severe obesity, which is very, very commonly associated

...