After replying to a complaint or two about NHS delays I noticed a figure in a newspaper article :
Obesity costs the NHS £19.2 billion pounds per year. This doesn’t include the loss in productivity caused by diseases related to being overweight. 63% of adults in England are overweight or obese, 26% being obese.
Slim people also get AF, diabetes, cardiac disease, cancer and osteoarthritis etc but you are much more likely to suffer from one or even all of those if you are overweight or obese.
You can draw your own conclusions from this I think……
Written by
Buffafly
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Let's face it, you can blame being overweight for everything going ! I can also think of excessive intake of alcohol and , to a lesser degree these days (hopefully) cigarette smoking.
Yes - they all take up a massive proportion of NHS resources. Unfortunately the UK is only 2nd to the US for obesity levels which unless we spend proportionally more, must impact on outcomes compared to other nations?
In the past few years since retirement I’ve had the luxury of time to shop for healthy ingredients and cook nutritious meals every day. Without the high stress work I was doing I’m no longer reaching for a quick boost of carbs. When I see young families living with the stress of short term contracts, worrying if they can keep up rent or mortgage payments, their children frequently experiencing climate change angst or mental health issues then it doesn’t surprise me to see their baskets filling with fast food junk.
I lost the 2 stone I needed to lose a few years back but still got Afib!
That reminds me of my situation many years back at the start of my AF journey. EP said my blood pressure was a bit high and would probably help if I could lose some weight. By the time of my next consultation I had lost about 2 stone and was feeling really good. However when he took my BP it was so high he made me lie down in a darkened room !! As a result I was put on anti hypertensive drug and remained on them for some years.( I don't take them now though as bood pressure is normal).
Thanks Buffafly for an interesting, partly shocking article. Just read it to my husband who wanted to point out that type 1 diabetes is usually caused by an autoimmune reaction. He has had type 1 for50 years. He may get a certificate for living with it for that length of time. I've been living with him for 30years so I think I deserve a certificate too. Lol
One of my brothers has type 1 diabetes diagnosed at 16 , just as he was about to sit his GCEs......he ended up taking them in hospital! He has just celebrated his 74th birthday.
My reaction was that if the population lived healthier lives - and we won’t go into all the reasons why it’s not easy - the NHS wouldn’t have the long waiting lists it does. It would mainly be treating unavoidable illnesses.
Thank you Buffafly, another really interesting thread. I remember we were having this conversation 50 years ago and things seem to have just gone from bad to worse!
That's v interesting. One of the things that I have been mindful of for some years is my BMI. When I have my annual bus drivers medical they always note my BMI ( so far they haven't yet used a sliderule to do the calcs), but I always tell my company doctor if I am regard as overweight ( BMI of 30 at 5'11" tall and 15 stone) then many I see struggling around supermarkets are on death row. I regard myself as slim ( but not trim, taught and terrific ... all that went out the window decades ago ). That said, I am carrying a tad too much weight around my tummy tum tum !
That said, my major health issue at 79 is Osteoarthritis .... makes AF look like a walk in the park .... not saying AF won't make an entrance stage left at any time in the future but for now its not an issue.
You do realise that the data behind BMl is based on measurements obtained on elite athletes and, as such, has little relevance to most people.
In addition, the guy that invented it did so purely as a statistical tool and never intended it to be used as a diagnostic tool. He has railed against the way it's used many times in the media.
Waist measurement seems to be the latest ‘rough guide’. Should be less than half your height otherwise indicateS possible ‘visceral fat’ (the bad one) according to NICE.
Isn’t it so that BMI acts as a kind of useful “surrogate” for measuring excess fat? I realise that it only measures excess weight, rather than fat, but I thought it was still generally regarded as sufficient and helpful.
I'd question "useful " how accurate is something that was never intended for use in that particular way? Remember that elite and extreme athletes have a higher incidence of AFib than the general population.
I didn't think that many professionals relied on BMI these days and I would be surprised if elite athletes. That said, used with common sense, as I would think it mostly has been, it still seems to me to be a decent way to guide weight and diet and it has likely helped very many to realise they need to shed some pounds. My wife always knows hers, but I never know mine, only that I ought to lose perhaps a stone in weight.
Atrial wall stretching is said to be what brings on AF in at least a proportion of sufferers and that, very occasionally, occurs in young people undergoing extreme athletic training as well as in those who are overweight and with high BP.
Listening to the Zoe podcasts recently I came across the one on the dreaded ‘belly fat’.
Yes, we can’t help but aquire belly fat as we age, especially us women. But we can keep it to an acceptable level so we are less disposed towards the other co-morbidities that plague our aging population, such as type 2 diabetes.
However, the really interesting fact I learned was that BMI levels aren’t at all useful and we should be calculating our waist to hip ratios. So, in the buff, measure around the level of your navel and then divide this by the measurement around the widest part of your hips.
It should be below 0.9 for men and 0.85 for women.
After losing 20lbs, I just scrape in at 0.83. Phew!
I am in the middle of Ultra Processed People by Chris van Tulleken. A phrase that stuck is that shaming and society blaming people for being overweight/obese and not having enough ‘will power’ is part of the problem. His - very thorough - research, based on his concern for his identical twins’ obesity and addiction to Ultra Processed Foods is the REAL problem and until government - especially the US and UK governments start to take action by banning UPF - it’s going to get a lot worse.
Chris van Tulleken makes the statement that UPF are more addictive than alcohol and nicotine but even worse - are twice as dangerous simply because they CAUSE obesity.
To everyone:- Please STOP blaming and shaming people who are overweight and pressure your MP and local councils to restrict fast food outlets, to educate and promote cooking from fresh ingredients and educate yourself as to what UPF is, what they do to the brain and affect behaviour and how for whom these foods mainly affect - many people living in poverty and students and - medical students.
The only organisation that is currently campaigning for better nutritional training of doctors is NutriTank - which I have promoted here more than once. Tell you GP practice of it’s existence!
I get very angry sometimes because for 4 or 5 years Local Authorities ran Family Learning programmes on a range of subjects.( Helping your child with English, Maths, Healthy Eating on a budget etc)This was in response to childhood obesity worries .
They were highly successful, were extremely popular with families, as they prepared and cooked food together,including cook once/ freeze and eat twice ,slow cooker usage ,fast food alternatives( French bread pizza instead of Domino's etc (
So obviously the programmes were cut due to LA budget considerations!
If we got our basics correct - nutrition, hygiene, exercise & sleep with basic health info to stay well physically & mentally then we wouldn’t need the drugs. So who benefits from withdrawal of such essential programmes?
I discovered yesterday that my very ‘artisanal looking’ supermarket cob loaf had a list of ingredients on the packet. It did rather spoil my enjoyment!
I’m sure your advice re bread is good but ‘real bread’ is a luxury item and making your own daily even in a bread maker isn’t something most people would do. Any suggestions, anybody? I’m off to investigate the ingredients of what looks like ‘real bread’ in my supermarket later.
Incidentally my daughter who was rated obese by the GP has discovered she is coeliac. The result has been that she has lost a lot of weight, partly from not being able to eat the office cakes and partly because she doesn’t feel hungry all the time as she used to.
We ended up buying a basic Panasonic breadmaker because it works out so much cheaper than buying junk free bread. The recipes that bread makers come with tend to be weird (added dried milk etc) and we don’t use them. My husband experimented until he found the perfect recipe for wholemeal spelt bread - it’s a gorgeous loaf, everyone loves it, easier to digest than wheat bread, takes 5 mins to prepare then 3 hours to bake. Doesn’t work on longer overnight programmes. Happy to share.
My husband makes our bread the old fashioned way . It is a very dense wholewheat bread and as well as flour has pumpkin seeds hazelnuts walnuts ,eggs and olive oil in it. It is delicious but does not toast well so for the 3 slices of toast we eat a week at breakfast we buy sliced wholemeal bread from the supermarket. The bread keeps well in the freezer so he only needs to bake once a fortnight and we keep it in the fridge rather than a breadbin. We don't eat a lot of bread though so somebody who ate more would have to bake more often or make a larger batch and it does dry out a bit if you keep it longer than 2 weeks in the freezer.
Ah lovely! We used to make bread that way too but got lazy. I did go through a sourdough phase when we couldn’t get yeast during lockdown, what a palaver!
I often think that, if there is a god, when we're ready to walk through the pearly gates he'll ask, "Were you one of the people who ate too much while the rest of the world starved". It does bother me that we have so much, while other people in the world don't even have clean water or food.
I was a child of the 1950s and I don’t remember a single obese person. I look back on all my school photos and there’s not a single fat/obese child or person to be seen. Sweets were still on ration until 1956, so I didn’t see many of them and I still have almost perfect teeth. We were also outside playing all day, not sitting indoors playing video games. We picked up everything unimaginable in our hands and never caught anything nasty. Sometimes I would really love to be able to turn the clock back.
I remember being in hospital for something when I was about 7/8 years old so c1959 and there was an obese girl in the bed opposite. I remember a mixture of shock and fascination as I had never seen another child like her. They said she had some glandular problem. When I went to secondary school the school had an exchange program with America where a girl went there for a year and an American girl lived with her family. The girl who went to America was lovely not skinny but not overweight in any way. She was captain of the lacrosse team. When she came back one year later she had put on masses of weight and was spotty. This would have been about 1965 so junk eating habits had already started to set in there.Not all of us were outside playing all day! I always preferred reading my book and having hay fever in the summer made the outside off putting. Now I am the opposite and feel trapped when I have to stay inside during heatwaves here!
In all my interactions with medical people either at GP or consultant level not one has ever mentioned my (over)weight nor offered help. They are trained to treat the superficial issue and not the underlying cause.
I have had AFib since 2014, hopefully my ablation will prevent it returning. I am not overweight, never have been, I exercised regularly, didn’t drink or smoke and didn’t eat junk food, I did everything I should have to keep fit and well, but still got it. My mother had it and she lived like I did and still got it. It can run in families.
Losing weight would not cause harm to any of us, we all choose what we put in our mouths and there is no reason or excuse for anyone. Most food stuffs now has the information on the outside, read it. Putting food and excise together will not make you ill. Banning Fast food or relying on the Government will fix nothing, it never has. If you do struggle with weight then eat the food you like, but not the food you love, as a starting point.
Yes , obesity is a major cause of many illnesses , and this correlation has involved a great deal of study.However, what may people don't realise is that being underweight , excessive slimming and yo-yo dieting and eating disorders like Anorexia as well as over exertion from compulsive physical training all come in at a close second in causes of chronic illnesses , particularly cardiac events and illnesses , neurological and stroke problems, bone issues and thyroid problems because of the toll these negative life choices put on the heart and brain.
It is just that these correlations are not as well researched or reported as yet or that the issues they cause and the damage done often occur some time after an individual may have returned to a normal lifestyle regime.
Skinny is an equal risk factor , especially in cardiac problems , but it's often overlooked even by healthcare professionals. Even a fit , muscular appearance can be an issue depending on how you got there.
The greatest cause of delays across the health care system ; outside the low uptake of jobs in the system reducing staff numbers, is actually something that health care users could help eliminate from today.
That is , the massive number of missed appointments, and appointments that could have been cancelled by the patient at an earlier point so that they could be filled by someone else.
In the NHS figures for 2020/21 , 6.4% of hospital appointments annually were being wasted , with 7.8 million ' no-shows ' per year, or 650,000 per month at GP surgeries.
Tackling that with patients help and consideration would make a huge difference to delays , especially for those whom are waiting a long time for less critical or urgent care needs.
63% is far too high! We always seem to follow US trends by about 20 years and theirs is worse.Although not the only cause of associated diseases and conditions, it surely cannot help matters.
I used to run family learning courses, some of which were Healthy Eating on a Budget. Always surprised me how little knowledge of either nutrition or budgeting/planning they had.
Too easy to order on Just Eat etc! One memorable mum, in group introduction, said her 2 year old favourite food was doner kebabs. I must have looked a bit taken aback and she swiftly added, ' oh not a whole one of course. But they are fine it's meat with no bones in it'
I fed my first two children mainly ‘home made’ food as much as possible but roll on nine years and things were different. My third was breast fed up to a year (yay me!) but was a very ‘picky’ eater and preferred grazing to the three meal a day routine (one of my older children still complains about my meanness with biscuits and chocolate bars to which I answer ‘there was always a bowl of fruit!’) But in the meantime I had discovered UPFs and my ‘baby’ was treated to Petit Fillous because she wouldn’t drink milk, and when I went to work and my husband worked until late every day foods like mini kievs and turkey drummers crept in 😔 at ‘teatime’, and ‘Alphabites for youngest only ‘ have also been a sore point. When she went to school she came home to inform me that the ‘all meat’ sausages I bought from the butcher were not up to the standard of the school dinner sausages 😂 One of the newspaper reports today is about how eating habits have changed, obviously not for the better but you can see why. One of the reasons not mentioned is that mothers nowadays are told that small children need food at least five times a day. My grandchildren still seem to eat on and off all day and when I visit I get rather hungry because ‘main meals’ are rather small 😕
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