Processed foods, easier to access ready meals/takeaways, loss of cooking/baking skills, poverty to a point, but most of all poor lifestyle choices. Lack of self respect and discipline, the good foods are there just as much as the bad ones. Lazyness of modern living give them the easy option. And a good balanced diet with equally good phiz is the best way to conteract it.

14 pages of stating the obvious and the witterings of apologists.

Unless you have a genuine medical condition, obese people are greedy and/or lazy. Stupidity is not a medical condition and not realising you get fat from eating too much and sitting on your ar$e in from of celebrity and reality trash tv is no excuse. Many other forms of behaviour are targeted for their impact on society, so why not the obese? (please note the distinction between overweight and obese)

I accept that there are mitigating factors with the demise of industry and a move to service jobs, physical excercise is less a part of daily routine. Marketing and covenience are also factors but just methods of exploiting the laziness of people.

It has been said numerous times already and its common sense for pity's sake, eat reasonably healthily and excercise in moderation.

Who knows maybe you wont be one of the increasing number of diabetes sufferers and maybe you wont die of a heart attack while your children are still young and maybe you wont be refused medical treatment in the future because anesthetising large animals too great a risk and maybe.....

Excess food.
Poor, proceesed food.
Take-aways.
Laziness.
Not doing enough house-work.
Cars.

Very Good

I agree but a lack of early education is a tragedy.

When I was at school we had a couple of "domestic science" classrooms, I doubt there's many schools with them now.

I mentioned some months ago about seeing frozen fish & chips in a supermarket priced at £1.50 or three meals for £4.00 (they also had roast chicken, beef and lamb dinners too). When you consider the number of people to be getting a margin out of that £1.50 (original producer, processor & supermarket), there ain't gonna be a whole heap of nutitional quality in the ingredients. Looking at the contents list only confirms this.

Jamie Oliver helped kick-start healthier meals appearing back on school dinner menus and schools now have a standard they are expected to reach. Unfortunately academies and "free" schools are exempt. The least we can do is educate (in the benefits of various foods) and feed our children to a decent standard

I believe good old 'Domestic Science' became 'Home Economics' or something similar - why was it the girls had cooking lessons and made sponge cakes & other delicacies to take home when us lads had to do woodwork and end with some manky looking coffee table which did it's best to stop itself jumping into the open fireplace ?

I was particularly proud of my cigarette box, it' still knocking around somewhere. Something that I doubt would get made today

I think Coddy's made a really important point, about education.

Ignoring the chicken-and-egg matter of what has killed off cooking skills for so many, it seems fairly logical to suggest that, for people to eat properly, they need some skills that many simply do not. So how do you re-introduce such skills?

It seems to me that there are two parts to this: the need to educate children and the need to educate older people/parents. The former is, in theory at least, easier than the latter. But it's not going to be helped if schools are allowed to ignore national minimum standards for school dinners etc. Accademies can already opt out; free schools will be able to too.

Because either the issue is genuinely important - and therefore a matter for the state - or it's a fuss about nothing.

my table barely made the trip home.....I think it gave way under the weight of it's first cuppa.....

Chippendale I am not !

Meant to add: was chatting to someone a couple of months about this issue of eating. He and his wife (both work in jobs that are not hugely paid) realised that they had lapsed into a habit at home of eating (with their two daughters) junk and convenience food most of the time. Now neither had no cooking skills, so they were not starting from scratch on that basis. They decided to change things and make an effort to cook properly every night. They found that the biggest problem was the girls, who took quite some time to adjust to natural tasting food and didn't like it for quite a while.