Not Invented Here (1): obesity

This month I'll be writing a series of articles about Not Invented Here Syndrome - when institutions reject practical solutions because they weren't part of their plan. The first is about obesity and weight loss drugs.

 

The Department of Health and Social Care says that obesity costs the NHS ‘up to £6.5 billion a year’. The health secretary Wes Streeting has claimed that it costs the NHS £11 billion a year. When wider societal costs, including lost productivity, are included, Frontier Economics estimated that obesity cost Britain £58 billion in 2020, and when they made a further estimate to include the cost of people being overweight in 2023, this rose to £98 billion, of which £19.2 billion were direct costs to the NHS.

Obesity is routinely referred to as a ‘crisis’ in the UK and elsewhere. Fifteen million adults (28 per cent) have a body mass index of 30 or more and are therefore classified as obese. The number of obese Britons has been gradually growing for decades and none of the anti-obesity policies enacted so far, such as the sugar tax and traffic light labelling on food, has made any tangible difference. Some countries have gone further. Hungary, for example, has an extensive system of taxes on food that is high in fat, salt or sugar (HFSS). Chile has had mandatory health warnings on HFSS food since 2016 and has banned the use of cartoon mascots such as Tony the Tiger. Both countries have seen obesity rates continue to rise.

Given how seriously public health campaigners take obesity as a health problem, you might think that they would be delighted to find something that makes people lose a great deal of weight in a short space of time. But you would be wrong. A new generation of pharmaceuticals that have been shown in randomised controlled trials to help people lose an average of 15 per cent to 20 per cent of their body weight have been given a cautious welcome at best by those who should be most excited by them.

 

Read the rest.