All further obesity research, dietary advice, and food labelling should be stopped and the money used to build an integrated, reliable public transport network, according to a letter in this week’s BMJ.
Nicole Lavery, a community adviser in Northern Ireland believes we have now reached saturation point as to how many studies and articles it takes to convince us that we are too fat as a nation.What good does it do to advise people that they need to walk, cycle and swim when the infrastructure is doing its best to prevent exactly this, she asks?
Despite all the suggested health assessments, dieticians’ advice, government guidelines, and supermarket labels there is something missing: action to force planners, developers, councils and local authorities to end totally unsustainable, fat-making practices, such as building roads without cycle lanes, she argues.
She suggests the only way we will be able to tie our laces in the future and not need cardiopulmonary resuscitation at the age of 35 is to demand and build a functioning, cyclist and pedestrian centred, integrated public transport network.
But she concludes “having witnessed the government’s transport policies in the last decades, I would say: fat chance.”
Source-BMJ
LIN/P
