Susan Jebb

speaker

142 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3 Jul

Susan Jebb’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Food Programme · The Weight of the World · 3 Jul 2026 podcast

John Major was the Prime Minister, and 12% of adults were living with obesity.

He set a target to return the prevalence to that it was in 1980, just 7%.

I remember thinking at the time that that was pretty ambitious, that we'd go from 12 back to 7%.

But I did think that once we had a national obesity strategy in place, we would at least halt the rise.

how badly we have failed, despite a whole series of plans and initiatives.

Everybody who was working in the field at the time thought that was pretty ambitious.

But I think we thought we could stabilise it.

I really, really don't think any of us believed that it would continue to increase so inexorably.

And of course the reason we're concerned is not because I really care what shape or size people are at one level.

I care because it's such a big risk factor for ill health.

So it's a bit like knowing that if you've got high blood pressure, you're at much higher risk of having a stroke.

If you're living with obesity, you are much higher risk of developing diabetes, heart disease, many kinds of cancer.

And as time's gone on, we've realised it's associated with just a huge range of diseases.

It affects every single organ system in the body.

And that shortens people's lives, it impairs people's quality of life.

And I just believe we can turn that around because I do want people to live happy, healthier lives.

So the figures I talk about in the lecture are from a report by Frontier Economics.

And they looked at the costs of obesity to the NHS, which comes out at just under 10 billion pounds a year.

And that's the excess costs

that are being incurred because people are overweight from a whole range of different conditions.

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