Parents to outlive obese children

Parents are likely to outlive their children in Western societies if the alarming increase in obesity continues, scientists warned today.

A combination of high-energy, aggressivelymarketed foods and a sedentary lifestyle in front of television or computer screens has serious consequences for world health, the British Association Annual Science Festival heard.

"For the past two decades, in affluent nations, obesity has been the fastest growing epidemic," Andrew Prentice, professor of nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told the conference.

"High levels of obesity are now recorded in Europe, Australasia, Central America and the Middle East," he said.

Already in the United States, gross obesity was becoming "alarmingly common". What was once called "adult onset diabetes" was being reported from child health clinics for the first time as a result.

In Britain, one in 10 of those starting primary school suffers from the condition. This figure increases to 15 per cent among school-leavers. Some 20 per cent of British men and 21 per cent of women are classed as obese.

"Such children and adolescents have a greatly reduced quality of life," the professor told the conference in Leicester. "The accumulation of chronic diseases precipitated by their obesity predicts a considerable shortening of lifespan." This reduction had recently been estimated to average nine years for the clinically obese, and is "likely to be much more" in the severely obese, he said.

"The answer to whether parents, as a generation, will outlive their children depends on the extent to which we continue to get fatter, and on the success of, and willingness to invest in, interventions to combat both obesity itself and the associated conditions. As things stand, the prognosis is not good. If anything, the incidence of obesity is gathering pace rather than slowing down, and current interventions are only marginally effective, and very expensive.

"Reliance on medical interventions to combat obesity would require costly lifelong treatments administered to over half of the adult population."

Numerous studies have revealed the alarming rate at which child obesity is spreading in Britain.

In May this year, nutritionists and dieticians at a forum held by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health revealed that by the year 2040, half the population will be obese. A study of more than 6,000 children published by Liverpool City Council in April this year found that more than a quarter of junior school pupils are overweight and one in seven is clinically obese.

An Evening Standard survey in July this year revealed that almost a third of London children are playing little or no competitive sport at school, raising fears that schools are contributing to producing obese couch potatoes who risk heart disease in later life.