Obesity as Big a Threat To UK as Terrorism

Public health expert Professor David Hunter has discovered the biggest threat to British society: obesity.

Professor Hunter, of Durham University, said that since the 1970s governments have done little more than 'tinkered round the edges' of the emerging health crisis.

'They have been talking about it for four decades but that never seems to be enough,' he said.

'The Government was quick to move for things like ID cards or 42-day detention without trial - now it needs to show similar leadership in public health.

'The threat to our future health is just as significant as the current security threat.'

Perhaps the NHS should initiate 42-day detentions for fast food restaurants that voluntarily serve portly diners. People who brazenly eat too much wheat bread after 6:00 pm? Throw the book at them.

Sound silly?

The cost to the NHS of treating obesity - already £1billion a year - will also soar.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said: 'We are tackling obesity through awareness campaigns and action in schools.'

Every primary school pupil in one of the country's most deprived cities could be offered free school meals regardless of need to tackle childhood obesity.

Officials and health chiefs in Liverpool want to become the first authority in Britain to ban packed lunches and provide compulsory healthy meals to 26,000 youngsters, aged between four and 11.

A recently released survey revealed that NHS was incapable in 2007 of even feeding the patients it had already assumed care for in hospitals. Now wise government advisers are proposing that the benevolent state, already having acknowledged its ineptitude in the hospital wards, take over the mandatory feeding of children "healthy meals" in school.

The British have lost their brains. Why doesn't the NHS do something about that?