Welcome to the town that will make you lose weight

Towns and cities need to be radically redesigned to help to tackle the obesity epidemic, scientists were told yesterday. Professor Philip James, chairman of the International Obesity Task Force, a London-based think-tank, called for a revolution in urban planning to encourage people to use cars less and public transport more. He told a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston that it was naive to expect people to lose weight by making better choices about diet and exercise when their surroundings encouraged inactivity.

Urban designers had created an “obesogenic environment” by planning public spaces around the car. Transport systems that made it easier to drive than to walk, cycle or take public transport were the worst contributors to obesity. He also blamed the rise of desk-bound office work and sedentary leisure activities such as watching television, surfing the internet and playing computer games. Lifts and escalators, and even labour-saving devices such as electric toothbrushes and can-openers added to the problem.

“Blaming individuals for their personal vulnerability to weight gain is no longer acceptable in a world where the majority is already overweight and obesity is rising everywhere,” said Professor James, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “It is naive of ill-informed politicians and food industry executives to place the onus on individuals making ‘healthier choices’ whilst the environment in which we live is the overwhelming factor amplifying the epidemic.”

Professor James highlighted Oslo in Norway as an example of a “slim city”, where the built environment is structured to discourage car use and encourage walking and cycling. Urban planning in the Netherlands and Denmark has also incorporated more physical activity in daily lives, lowering obesity rates.

Professor James attacked some food manufacturers and retailers for resisting “traffic light” labelling schemes. He said: “The approach seems to be the one many parts of the food industry fear most – and perhaps for good reason because it warns consumers when what they are getting is mostly a junk-food combination of fattening ingredients of little nutritional value.”

He said that for half a century, food technology had refined the production of precise combinations of flavours – largely artificial – that could hook us on particular types of foods. “Along with that precision targeting of taste, finely honed techniques of marketing have been used to mould consumer preferences in ways which were unthinkable for earlier generations. In particular the way in which children have been targeted in recent decades has shown that the ruthless drive to increase sales and consumption figures has overridden common sense and the need for social responsibility.”

Full article at the Times of London Online