Reaping the Rewards from Obesity

08 Jun 2010 – Frances Buckingham

There are some days it feels like we are tinkering around the edges of a world that has gone mad. Today, as I read the headline ‘Rich prize awaits winner of race to treat obesity’ was one of those days. The article reports on the likelihood that three new anti-obesity drugs could win approval in the US this year and if approved by the Food and Drug Administration will gain access to the biggest medicines market in the world.

While I understand the need to deal with a worldwide pandemic that causes heart disease, diabetes and cancer and is predicted to cost £6.3 billion to the health service in England alone by 2015, the fact that food companies are making millions selling the products that in part are a cause of the problem and now drug companies are going to reap the benefit by trying to solve the problem, just seems absurd.

I was interested therefore to hear the views of one of the panellists on the nutrition and development webcast from the Nestle CSV Forum that my colleagues were involved in last week. Professor Eileen Kennedy – Dean and Professor of Nutrition, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University – articulated well my immediate response to the headline that “prevention is so much more cost-effective than therapeutics or a cure”. This was reiterated by Michael Pollan who was speaking at the RSA this week who neatly put it that it is “More economical and beautiful to focus on changing the diet” than medicalise the problems that the food system has created.

I know that obesity is as much to do with individual behaviour and increasingly sedentary lifestyles as it is to do with over-consumption, especially of the wrong types of processed food, but is this really the way that we want to deal with it?