Next generation must learn lessons of obesity epidemic

The third Big Question event focused on finding an answer to the obesity epidemic

If the obesity epidemic can be reversed it will depend on the lessons our children learn from this generation, according to a panel of academic experts at Brunel University London’s third Big Question event.

Panellists highlighted ‘immoral’ mass marketing by the food industry, thrusting unhealthy messages in the direction of vulnerable youngsters; and a lack of responsible labelling misleading the wider public.

But they also considered questions that have only started to be asked in the scientific community in recent years, about everything from the genes we inherit to the combination of chemicals in the environment, and the impact these factors may have on such a weighty issue.

The discussion, chaired by award-winning journalist Helen Briggs, asked What is really to blame for the obesity epidemic? of eminent academics Gerard Hastings, the first UK Professor of Social Marketing; Brunel’s Professor Juliette Legler, whose research includes early life stage exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals; clinical endocrinologist Professor Jonathan Seckl; and Professor Sir Stephen Bloom, Head of Division for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism at Imperial College London.

“Marketers are very carefully and very assiduously exploiting our vulnerabilities - our vulnerabilities of belonging, feeling good and unbottling happiness. Nowhere is that more apparent than with our children,” explained Prof Hastings, who gave the examples of Coca Cola, Mars and Starbucks spending vast sums of money and marketing energy on targeting us all with unhealthy food and drink.

Importantly, he said, children aren’t excluded from these marketing efforts despite the fact that they can’t fully judge what they are being told until they reach their teenage years.

“By age 10 it’s really over, the die has been cast. Children are being pre-programmed before they even have the critical faculties to resist that pre-programming,” Prof Hastings added.

But there’s more to the issue than just marketing, the panel agreed. Our understanding of what we are putting in our bodies and how it might affect us has never been less certain.

“We are not aware of the number of chemicals that we are actually exposed to and we haven’t identified these chemicals in our everyday lives,” said Professor Legler, who explained the obesogen hypothesis, a theory stating that some of the chemicals in our environment predispose certain individuals to a lifelong struggle with obesity.

“In our human studies we have quite clear evidence that the levels of chemicals in the core blood of babies at birth are associated with a higher weight gain in children up to the age of 10.”

Prof Seckl added another cause to the discussion, referring to the epigenetic effect at the centre of his own studies, a mechanism that demonstrates that things happening to a foetus in the womb can determine what will happen to someone in their later life.

“Yes, obesity is all about the genes you’re born with and far too many calories in the adult environment, but in addition to that there is an early life epigenetic process that determines your susceptibility beyond the genes and is potentially remediable,” he said, explaining that studies could one day help us to understand whether individuals are obese because they eat too much or because of their genes – and therefore can be helped.

Genes, explained Prof Sir Stephen Bloom, are central to the discussion, but he attempted to simplify the argument for the audience.

He said in the past humans were born into families of six to eight children and those who managed to eat the most food would have the best chance of survival.

Addressing the audience, he said: “The lazy and greedy were the ones that were going to live, so you are, it’s obvious, very lazy and extremely greedy. There’s no real reason to look for another cause, it’s built into our genes - only the lazy and the greedy survive.”

To see the full discussion, visit http://ift.tt/1rkQRUM.

The Big Question events form part of Brunel University London’s 50^th Anniversary celebrations. To find out more about all the events the university has planned to celebrate its 50^th, visit http://ift.tt/1SMTuro.

Brunel University London

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Next generation must learn lessons of obesity epidemic