For related articles and information, please visit OCA’s Health Issues page and our Appetite For a Change page.

Food is one of the most crucial issues of our time. In America, 13 people die every hour from food-related illnesses, but we have no real solution to the obesity problem – the issues are myriad, and too ingrained in all corners of our life and our profit-loving world for any one idea to work. And politicians like simple ideas. So while there should indeed be a tax on sweetened fizzy drinks, that won’t solve the problem on its own. We need a full-scale culture shift, something no government can achieve.

The facts are chilling: one in seven hospital patients in the UK are diabetic; 3.8 million of us have diabetes; one in three is overweight; one in four is clinically obese; and 37% of 11-year-old children are overweight or obese. We are one of the most unhealthy countries in the world. Even moderate obesity will reduce life expectancy by an average of three years. And living with diet-related diseases means heart trouble, cancers, strokes, liver failure, wobbly knees, bad skin and amputation of limbs. It means hospitals spending fortunes to enlarge beds, operating tables, doorways and wheelchairs. Food-related illnesses now kill more people a year than smoking does, and disable an unknown number.

If I were talking about cancer or HIV, there would be a redoubling of efforts to “find a cure”. But unlike many cancers, there is a complete, lifetime, free cure available. Just change what and how we eat.

So why don’t we? Where food is concerned, we’re complicated. We aspire to extreme thinness as advocated by fashion and reinforced by the cult of celebrity, but in reality we nearly all struggle with the pounds. We see people who are grossly fat, their wobbling, sad bodies being winched out of windows, and class that as “obesity”, distancing ourselves from the term. As a recovering alcoholic it’s a syndrome I’m familiar with – I might be getting drunk but I still have a roof over my head, unlike a “real” alcoholic, who sleeps on a park bench. Are we seriously so weak-willed that we can’t say “no” to that extra cake? Go back just 30 years and very few people were obese. Go back 50 years and virtually no one was. For women, size 10 and 12 was the norm, rather than 14 and 16 today – and we ate three meals a day, with tea thrown in for special occasions. Most of us didn’t eat unless we were sat at a table at a regular time of day.