Live panel discussion on obesity with Dr Patrick Holmes and Dr Amar Puttanna

So the first question is a big, wide-ranging question.

What is the impact of obesity and associated conditions on patients and on health care?

I brought my iPad, mainly because there's big numbers, and I can never remember numbers.

But I suppose one thing to think about in terms of the impact on the nation, 3% of our GDP is lost by the effect of obesity.

So if we didn't have obesity, we'd be 3% wealthier.

And what do those big numbers look like? We're talking 126 billion pounds a year of costs.

And that number has been going up.

Of course, there's a lot of different costs within that.

The NHS costs are much smaller.

So we're talking about just a mere 12 and a half billion.

And those costs are going up year

on

year.

So One of the challenges as a nation we have from a political perspective, I suppose, is productivity.

We often, sometimes you'll hear about that on the radio.

how Europe's so unproductive compared to the states.

I can't understand, but one of our productive issues, I think the states would have the same issue, is obesity because, as I say, the financial impact of obesity and the diseases that it affects and the time off work and associated morbidity, again, it's that big number, which is 31 billion pounds a year, and those numbers come from the frontier economics report of

2025,

and the report from 2023 is often quoted by, or was quoted by, Wes Streeting.

I guess, from my point of view, what's the impact of obesity? Burden, in a way, in a broad sense, because, you know, burden the patient perspective, the conditions downstream that obesity impacts, not just the conditions, but also the mobility, the working life issues, the number of associations with obesity now that we're finding from chronic pain to productivity, et cetera.

Impact and burden on the workforce, so ourselves, and how we manage such patients, looking to the future, but managing them now.

and that has health and economic burden, and political and policy burden.

So that's what we're dealing with, and it's clear, and you can correct me if you'd feel otherwise, that we aren't ready, and we haven't been ready for it, despite knowing what's happening.

I always say follow, in a way, in the UK we follow America in a lot of things, certainly healthcare is one of those things.

If you look about 20 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, it was when Texas is the fattest state, or the most obese state, is that the correct word, in the US, and one in four people were obese or overweight.