Birmingham Sustainability Forum: Linda Hindle’s presentation
Here is Linda Hindle’s very thought-provoking presentation Food and Nutrition – Public Health Perspective which she gave last night at the Birmingham Sustainability Forum on ‘Feeding the City’.
It includes a series of startling stats put on to a map of England and Wales, illustrating the dramatic increase in the number of obese adults from 1993 to 2010; i.e. in less than 20 years.
By 2006, every area of England and Wales had more than one in five adults, men and women, who were obese. Here in the West Midlands, every fourth woman is obese, and this has been so since 2000; men caught up with woman on the fatness stakes in 2004.
In her excellent presentation, Linda gave us some significant reasons why this has happened, one of which is graphically illustrated in this slide:
As the social and public health consequences of obesity are so great, she said that our public health priorities are to
- increase access to affordable healthy food choices
- increase skills to prepare healthy food
- reduce over-reliance on high fat/high sugar snack food
- support and inspire people to make healthy food choices
- restoring a food culture that values healthy food
[...] a major public health issue and looks set to increase; it needs to be addressed, and quickly. (See Linda Hindle’s presentation to the Birmingham Sustainability Forum to get a grasp of the size of the issue facing [...]
[...] public health system, notably in relation to diet. (see Linda Hindle’s presentation [...]