For the first time in history, being overweight is killing more people than being underweight, says celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, and we have to do something about it before it’s too late. Jamie Oliver spoke at the One Young World conference in Zurich, urging delegates to take action against the world’s growing weight problem – a problem affecting over 1 billion people worldwide! Here’s what he had to say about the obesity epidemic in the UK and across the world:
When I became a father I got to thinking about food issues and it inspired me to start campaigning.
What I could see was that we are losing our food knowledge and skills and that this loss of wisdom is causing the world’s biggest and most preventable epidemic – obesity.
The UK is one of the most obese countries in the world. But over the past 20 years the problem has started to appear fast in middle and low-income countries too.
For the first time in history, being overweight is killing more people than being underweight. Let me scare you with the facts.
Death: Every year, nearly 5.5million people die from obesity and diet-related disease.
An additional 5.8million people die each year from high blood glucose – diabetes to you and me.
Disease: Being overweight causes 90 percent of Type 2 diabetes, a quarter of heart disease and up to 40 per cent of some cancers.
Across the world, a billion people are overweight. But the frightening thing is that it’s happening to our kids: 42million children under the age of five are already obese.
The figures show this is not just in America but across the developing world and China. It’s frightening – a timebomb waiting to go off.
With our Western-style diets, our biggest problems are a direct result of what the experts call “bad feeding” – which basically means eating a load of rubbish, highly processed food that’s jammed full of salt, fats, sugars, additives and cheap, processed meats.
Not only are countries full of these foods, many people consider them normal.
Even when I was working in Los Angeles, in clear view of the Hollywood sign, there were food deserts, poverty and hunger all around me.
There were fast food restaurants on every corner but families who were trying to eat better food were telling me it could take them as long as a a four-hour round-trip on a bus to get to the other side of the city to buy fresh produce.
But you never see that side of Hollywood in movies, do you?
We also need to recognise the way that kids from England, Australia, China, Kenya and Japan are growing up liking the same football teams, games, music and foods.
These “globokids” are all digging the same flavours and being lured by ads that tell them to get excited by the taste of burgers, fries, fried chicken, soda and low-quality foods. The globo culture is also robbing you of your food knowledge by replacing food made in the home with food made in factories. It’s reached the point where kids do not even recognise basic fruit and vegetables yet are able to spot a fast-food brand a mile off.
This lack of knowledge and understanding is something I’ve spent a lot of my career trying to make people aware of.
We need to stand up and start demanding that businesses and governments help us change the food landscape around us. We keep mentioning big food brands – and you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that many of these companies bring a lot of problems with them.
Yes, it’s easy for me to slag them off but if I’m going to be grown-up and responsible about it then I have to accept they’re here to stay so we need to look at ways they can do better for us.
Education and awareness have created clever consumers in the UK and that has directly influenced the business practices of McDonald’s and loads of other fast food chains and supermarkets in the UK, making them clearer and more honest about the food and where it’s coming from.
It is your right to demand that they strive to do better. Businesses are way better resourced than governments are, and their Achilles’ heel is that they want your dollar and they want to please you. They will bend to your will if you make them.
We also need people to know how to cook, to go out to speak to paediatricians, doctors and dentists to understand how big the problem is and to form a global movement to make obesity a human rights issue.
On September 20 the UN is holding its first summit on preventable disease since the 1980s. The idea is to get heads of state to take notice of the heart disease, cancer and diabetes which are killing the world’s population. Obesity has to become an international health priority. NOW. In ten years it will be too late.
I believe that together we can make some real noise ahead of this meeting.
Help me to take the Food Revolution global and get a million signatures on my petition. I promise to send it to UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon with a message on your behalf, challenging him to make this his mission.
Join Jamie’s Food Revolution at jamieoliver.com.
