Challenging obesity myths

I was on TalkTV the other day talking about obesity. The story brought together a couple of myths propagated by The Times (which, like TalkTV, is owned by News UK), including the idea that obesity-related hospital admissions have doubled in six years. 

I was interested to see that that the £98 billion of 'wider costs to society' claimed by The Times two weeks ago has already morphed into a £98 billion cost to the NHS. I only got one bite of cherry in this interview which I used to challenge both of these lies. I was up against a doctor who basically just said that obesity was unhealthy.

If I had had a chance to respond to his last point, I would have explained that a secondary diagnosis for obesity is not equivalent to obesity being a partial cause of the illness with which a person is admitted. As I wrote on my Substack... 

 

For example, if an obese woman goes to hospital to have a baby, that is not an obesity-related admission in the sense that it could have been avoided if she wasn’t obese, but it will be recorded as such if a medic thinks her obesity is relevant to her care. This is not a random example. Maternal care is, by some distance, the most common type of admission to have a secondary diagnosis of obesity recorded.