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Letters: Action on obesity

Action on obesity is an ethical duty for the Government

Monday 29 August 2011 00:00 BST
Comments

Your leading article "The case for a fat tax", (26 August) recommends government action on obesity.

A series of articles published in The Lancet highlight a growing obesity epidemic. If the UK continues with "business as usual", by 2030 there will be 11 million more obese adults, with medical costs associated with obesity-related disease treatment rising by almost £2bn per year.

In its 2007 report Public Health: Ethical Issues the Nuffield Council on Bioethics set out the ethical responsibilities that the Government has, acting as "steward", to create conditions in which people can live healthy lives. A range of interventions is possible, from providing information ("five-a-day"), to disincentives through taxation (which works in the case of alcohol), to legal requirements ( such as obligatory "traffic light" labelling). The evidence as to the harms arising from obesity is clear and the duty of governments to act is surely no longer in doubt.

So far, the UK Government has relied too much on self-regulation by the food and drinks industries and on misinterpretations of "nudge" theory. It is clear from The Lancet that without government leadership, the obesity epidemic will not be reversed. We remind the Government that not only do they need to take the lead to prevent obesity, but they have an ethical duty to do so.

Hugh Whittall

Director, Nuffield Council on Bioethics,

London WC1

A year ago, aged 62, I weighed 80kg. Having noticed that I needed to put new notches in my belt, I recently checked my weight again. I had lost about 11kg.

The only change to my lifestyle was the acquisition of a dog that demands about five miles of walking every day. No fancy dieting, no gym subscription, no noticeable reduction in food intake, just walking. Dogs might not be everyone's cup of tea, but there might be a lesson here.

Michael Boswell

New Buckenham, Norfolk

How can you possibly print such rubbish as the front-page report "UK fat alert" (26 August). With government cutting benefits, raising VAT and making more redundant, and with food prices increasing, how are people going to find the money to buy food? Also the increase in fuel prices will make more walk to work or the shops. Try living in the real world.

Alex Graham

Belfast

A two-pronged attack is needed on eating too much and exercising too little. Greed and sloth must both be tackled. The latter represents the greater challenge. Could not treadmills be the answer? Why are all the machines in gyms not designed to generate green energy? Access to NHS treatment for obesity could be made dependent on putting in a specific number of hours.

Martin Oliver

Exeter

Art-science split hampers UK plc

Your headline "Google chief lambasts the UK for its technophobic 'luvvie' culture" misses the main point of Eric Schmidt's speech. The fundamental failure of UK culture is not that it promotes the arts at the expense of science, although this is bad enough; it is that we continue to see each in opposition to the other.

Over the past eight years I have grown a technology startup from my kitchen into an international enterprise employing 25 well-qualified staff. I recruit almost exclusively at postgraduate level from good-quality UK universities. My twin frustrations are that even at this level I can rarely find engineers and scientists who can write, or marketing or PR people who have even the basic technical literacy to understand the business we are asking them to support. Recruitment and training costs are excessive compared with my foreign competitors.

I don't understand why the provision of a compulsorily broad arts/science education to 18 is even a matter for debate. Specialists are only of use to very large established organisations where other departments cover other specialisms. You cannot grow new businesses with such people, and the age of stable large organisations passed several decades ago. In whose interest, then, is it to produce legions of utterly useless pure scientific or arts specialists? Where are the jobs, where is the economic future?

Could it be that the educational specialists and civil servants (and even the media) who shape this debate have simply become so focused on their own little worlds that they have lost sight of the reality of the society around them?

Matthew Rhodes

Managing Director, Encraft Ltd, Leamington Spa,

Warwickshire

I am in agreement with Helen White that the English Baccalaureate might not be the answer for English students ("Baccalaureate is not relevant to students, says top headmistress", 25 August) because it still does not go far enough in providing breadth of study.

Perhaps those who are interested in a curriculum that, in Michael Gove's own words, gives young people "a rounded sense of how to understand the world in all its complexity and richness" should consider the well-established and highly regarded International Baccalaureate instead. The IB Middle Years Programme encourages students to see all knowledge as inter-related, rather than located in discrete subject silos.

The E-Bac seems to follow more of a tick-box approach.

Fergus Rose

ACS International Schools

Cobham, Surrey

Riot control in India

Nitin Mehta (letter, 26 August) appears to take pride in the brutality that the police unleash on often innocent people in India. Surely he is not proposing that the police here baton-charge people, impose curfew or shoot at unarmed civilians, even when they are protesting peacefully.

He is right that in India the trigger-happy police shoot at the slightest provocation, or arrange a "fake encounter" to eliminate people they do not like.

Perhaps Mr Mehta has never been involved in a curfew, which is a form of collective punishment. People cannot buy food. Mothers cannot buy milk for their babies and the sick cannot go to the hospital. Needless to say, this most affects the most vulnerable.

As for children being brought up with a strong work ethic, this does not seem to apply to children of the rich and powerful, who can bribe their way out of any situation.

In Britain we may have slipped a little in recent times but the general principles of discipline and compassion are still in place, unlike in India where the amount of compassion received is directly proportional to how well heeled you are or to which ethnic minority or caste you belong.

We do not need a state where the police are used to terrorise people, particularly the minorities. Change brought about by education and interaction is more lasting and better for society.

Dr Mehmood H Mir

Glasgow

Big day, little information

I was amused but also rather irritated to read in The Independent Magazine (27 August) Nicholas Lyndhurst's comment about his wedding some years ago that "the vicar told the press". I was vicar involved. I did not tell the press.

Nicholas Lyndhurst and his fiancée booked their wedding with me at one of our three churches. I had a preliminary interview with them and arranged for the banns to be read. Some months later I was telephoned by a reporter. He already knew the date and place of the wedding.

According to my understanding of English Law, marriage is a public ceremony, and there must be no hint of secrecy about it. That is why we read banns. For that reason, and because the couple gave me no indication that they wanted the date and place kept confidential, I saw no point in denying that the reporter's information was correct.

He learnt nothing further from me, although he continued by asking a number of impertinent questions, to all of which I gave noncommittal replies: and I refused to give him any more information. His final shot, as I remember, was "Is the bride beautiful?" To this I gave the flip reply: "Of course: all our brides are beautiful!"

That was the extent of my "telling the press". According to your report, Nicholas Lyndhurst commented that "Astoundingly enough, there isn't any sort of vicar disciplinary hearing." Actually there is: but complying with English marriage law while trying hard to preserve a couple's privacy did not justify such a hearing.

John Williams

West Wittering, West Sussex

Class war in the holiday cottage

In an attempt to assure my daughter's future, I'm in the middle of having a bequeathed house in the Yorkshire Dales made ready for holiday letting. I hadn't considered though that this makes me little more than a tool of capitalism in the class war, "the renting of cottages being by and large a bourgeois vice", as your man Robert Hanks grumbles ("The bookshelves of holiday cottages speak volumes about us", 27 August).

I must re-educate my workmates at the refuse transfer station, who regularly holiday in cottages, about their class loyalties.

Be that as it may. My proletarian background unfortunately denies me the cultural savvy to seed a bookcase with books for the bourgeoisie to steal on leaving. Can your readers suggest a slack handful (a phrase from Hull docks that Hanks won't have heard before) of literature to suit? If they write in Big Letters, I'm sure I'll be able to read their replies.

Given the weather, though, why on earth they would want to go to Yorkshire in the first place is beyond me.

Chris Barratt

Birmingham

Nebulous threat looms over Tate

As a Tate member I was appalled to read (27 August) that Nicholas Serota has engaged a pair of "consultants" to advise the organisation on costs savings.

Having worked in education for in excess of 30 years, and during that time having been exposed to the findings of numerous "consultants", a very high proportion of whom delivered reports of little substance but a great deal of nebulous management-speak I sympathise with the Tate staff. Reading the extracts of the two consultants' CVs published in The Independent, I can imagine the kind of expensive drivel that will be contained in their reports to Sir Nicholas.

My message to Tate senior managers is: don't be sucked into this expensive and wasteful approach to "saving" money; look at more creative ways of enhancing income (after all, you should all be creative people) and value the staff that you have.

David Felton

Crewe

Etiquette for cyclists

Jenny Macmillan (letters 26 August) says that while cycling she applies shock tactics to those pedestrians who "blatantly spread themselves across the whole path". I like to walk with my wife side-by-side but have perforce to go into single file when meeting a cyclist. Some years ago I was sent flying by a speeding cyclist.

Now that I am older and have a new hip I am faced with this question: how many times per walk must I step aside for cyclists who speed past without a smile or a word, before raising a protest? Sadly those who have and use a bell when coming up behind you or who say a word of thanks in passing are few.

Jenny Macmillan wishes to reserve civilised behaviour for those walkers who "take care", that is to say those who get out of her way quickly enough. That is not good enough.

Peter Randell

Woking, Surrey

Some local authorities presume to reduce crowding on paths shared by cyclists and pedestrians by putting up notices: "Cyclists Dismount", having never noticed that a mounted cyclist is no wider than his handlebars, but when he walks beside it he occupies twice as much space.

Cyclists might be encouraged to comply with this command if there were equally fatuous notices for pedestrians, such as "Mothers, carry your prams on your heads and make your babies crawl."

Peter Forster

London N4

Holiday spin

The Independent, in common with the rest of the media, was regularly critical of political spin during the last Labour government. So, why now is it so happy to publish the staged photo-opportunities of David Cameron's holidays? You've printed posed pictures of him and his wife in Italy, then in Cornwall after his interrupted holiday and yet again in Cornwall on his staged visit to Truro hospital. Political spin can only work if the media play their part.

Norman Evans

East Horsley, Surrey

The size of it

You have a caption describing a newly discovered mammal in Vietnam (24 August): "the Bosavi woolly rat, an over-sized but vegetarian rodent". The rodent is large but a vegetarian! Most rodents are. Or does being "oversize" mean that an animal is carnivorous?

Fabian Acker

London SE22

Perspectives on the fall of Gaddafi

Divided rulers take over a wrecked country

Leaderless revolutions have a bad record, and Libya's rag-tag rebel government, with its tribal, geographic, ethnic and religious divisions, looks doomed from the start.

The cynical assassination of the rebel commander Abdul Fattah Younes last month revealed the deep fault-lines dividing the Transitional Council. While the some of council's civilian leadership appear to be fair-minded idealists, it has little control over its "army" of al-Qa'ida mercenaries and tribal hooligans.

Tripoli's infrastructure has been destroyed by 20,000 Nato air strikes, leaving blackouts and shortages of water, food and medicine, as well as lawlessness, murder and vicious fire-fights.

It remains to be seen how David Cameron and Nicholas Sarkozy intend to mend the country they wrecked.

Dr John Cameron

St Andrews, Fife

The idea was to prevent a catastrophe, not cause one

Under Resolution 1973, the UN agreed to a no-fly zone over Libya, to prevent Gaddafi using the Libyan air force and army helicopters to attack the rebels and bomb the civilian areas where they were based. This was to avoid a "humanitarian catastrophe". It did not sanction "regime change", nor an air campaign against Gaddafi's army, or the Libyan government.

However, as has happened numerous times before,the West deliberately misinterpreted a UN mandate, in this case to justify acting as an offensive air force for the rebel army, rather than a defensive air force for the civilian population. Welcome as the end of Gaddafi's regime is, the military campaign against Libya was illegal and the leaders of the Western countries most involved, Britain, France and Italy are as guilty of war crimes as Gaddafi.

As has been seen elsewhere, founding a new regime on the basis of an illegal war is a recipe for continuing instability. All reports coming out of Libya seem to be referring to a "humanitarian catastrophe" – so the way the UN resolution was executed failed to achieve its primary objective.

Julius Marstrand

Cheltenham

Doomsayers proved wrong by the rebel victory

I have been disappointed by the pessimistic and negative character of much British reporting on the Libyan revolution, especially by the BBC. At each stage, reporters explained the insuperable obstacles faced by the rebels, the stalemate on all fronts, and the inability of the rebels to organise. At each stage, they were proved wrong. Now that the revolution is largely complete, the same reporters are explaining the insuperable difficulties faced by the new government, doubts about their competence, and the risk of decline into sectarian violence.

I think we should rejoice. The Libyan nation has arisen and deposed a tyrant. They are united in wanting Gaddafi to be succeeded by a legitimate national government. The totalitarian nature of the Gaddafi regime means that no alternative institutions or authorities existed, and so the task of building a new state will be laborious, but that is no reason why it should not succeed. The negative reporters will again be proved wrong.

I therefore disagree with the admonishing tone of your leader on 24 August. The rebels realise that they have to consolidate the nation, rebuild institutions and create a civil society. They should be left to take their own decisions and helped to overcome the many obstacles they face.

Anthony C Pick

Newbury, Berkshire

Amid the massacres, a chance for profit

I wonder if those MPs who voted to attack Libya were happy to read your report (27 August) of the massacres and torture of mainly black people by "rebels" whom that they supported with arms, money, SAS etc.

Any that have business interests in Middle East will no doubt be hoping to sign up contracts for rebuilding the country they voted to destroy.

Len Aldis

London E3

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