Festival of Science: People are literally eating themselves to death, writes Dick Ahlstrom, Science Editor, in Salford. There is an obesity crisis that is causing extensive premature death, and people are too fond of the kind of foods they should avoid.
"Most of your readers are slimming and so they should be," said Prof Steve Bloom of Imperial College London. "Not only is obesity a public health disaster, with 1,000 people dying prematurely every week in the UK, it is also a social disaster as the obese are far more likely to suffer depression, have a lower income and to be divorced."
Prof Bloom was speaking yesterday during a British Association Festival of Science session entitled "We Can't Go On Eating Like This."
"The human body has evolved so it is able to store fat which can then be used during times of famine," he said. Society had changed significantly over the past few centuries, however, with food becoming far more available, and with this came a greater tendency towards excess weight.
"At the same time as food being so easily available, society also prevents us from burning off the excess calories as cars and public transport are so convenient," Prof Bloom said.
There was an urgent need to develop new treatments, he said. Research through the 1990s delved into how the circuits of the brain and mechanisms in the body connect to tell us when to start and stop eating.
This work in turn led to the discovery of hormones that signal when to eat and when to stop, providing the potential for simple chemical treatments for obesity. One is the gut hormone, ghrelin, that tells us we are hungry. Another, PYY3-36, tells the body it has taken enough food.
"Here we have a chemical means to control the way people behave," he said, leading to the possibility that "a simple pill may eventually be developed to reduce appetite, providing a cure for this global epidemic".
He added, however: "Finding ways of controlling the mind is really dangerous." He described an experimental substance that could control appetite by blocking a cell receptor called MC4R. It had a surprise side-effect, however, producing a significant increase in sex drive, Prof Bloom said.
Our lifestyles and dangerous food choices are affected by a number of factors, according to Prof Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University in London. Our biological make-up caused us to crave sweet, fatty foods. Marketing companies spent almost €860 million a year advertising foods, many of them sweet, salty and fatty. Social pressures and a more sedentary lifestyle also contributed, he said.
The comic book characters, the Bash Street Kids, are being used as a way to help reverse at least some of this by attempting to change eating habits in children, in particular encouraging them to eat more fruit.
Prof Marion Hetherington, professor of psychiatry at the University of Liverpool, described the work that attempts to emphasise the pleasure in eating. "Food is about fuel, but it is also about fun," she said yesterday.
Four schools in Dundee, Scotland, are participating in the study which involves portraying the Bash Street cartoon characters as fond of fruit.