Getting serious about obesity

Obesity continues to be one of the biggest health threats to the UK population. We therefore welcome the fact that two of the United Kingdom’s most important medical organisations—the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges—have launched major reports this year setting out concrete steps for responding to this crisis.

According to the BMA’s consensus statement on the role of the doctor,1 doctors have to act in “the best interests of their patients and of the population served.” In helping serve the best interests of patients, the RCP report takes several important steps to help bring UK clinical practices in line with those in the United States, which also has an obesity crisis.2 These include developing bariatric medicine as a clinical subspecialty, along with better education for general practitioners, a patient charter, introducing a cross governmental obesity chief, and research into better pharmaceutical and surgical interventions to treat obesity as a medical condition.

Yet such actions can play only a small part in tackling the UK’s obesity crisis. Thirty years ago the RCP …