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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Lots of it comes from the relationship with type 2 diabetes, but also with things like joint problems, knee replacements and so forth.
But actually that turns out to be the tip of the iceberg because being overweight is a sort of...
kind of drain on our health and well-being.
It is also associated with quite a lot of time off work, whether that's people who are unwell or they've got hospital appointments, a whole raft of reasons.
And so when they looked in detail at the economics of it, what they realised is that most of the costs of obesity were actually being felt in the wider economy.
And so the reduction in what's called economic productivity was estimated at about £24 billion.
I think it's become pretty clear that being overweight is a contributor to our poor productivity and growth in the UK.
It's one of the reasons why this government's had a sort of renewed interest in tackling obesity, because they want to see that if we can support more people to effectively lose weight, whether we'll be able to both keep people in the workplace who might otherwise have had to retire early with ill health, or perhaps even get some people back into work.
Our visual norms have really changed and if you compare your old school photographs with those of your children or your grandchildren, I think you'll see that the difference in the shape and size of even the average child is really quite remarkable.
Children in the most deprived areas are twice as likely to have obesity compared to the most affluent, and that gap is increasing over time.
As Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, pointed out in his report, even if you look just within quite small geographical areas like Blackpool,
we can see that the average life expectancy varies by more than 10 years, and areas with the highest levels of obesity map closely to the areas of that lower life expectancy.
We absolutely know that obesity is much more common among families who are living in more deprived areas and families who have very little money.
What we need to recognise is that some of the least healthy foods are also some of the cheapest foods and some of the more healthy fruits and vegetables are more expensive.
But it's more than just price, it's also about norms and culture and there's a sort of intergenerational food habits which are also fuelling the system.
So we need to help people to sort of escape from that environment.
And that's partly about getting the food industry to change the way it presents and sells and promotes food.
In 2015, Public Health England set a target to reduce sugar in 10 categories by 20% in five years.
We saw good progress in breakfast cereals and yoghurts, but much less in most other categories.
Now, I accept that reformulation is hard in things like biscuits, but in many categories, absolute sales of sugar actually increased.
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