May’s obesity ‘plan’ betrays children who face a rising tide of preventable cancer | Harpal Kumar

A year ago the government promised action to tackle the staggeringly high levels of child obesity across the country. A third of our children leave primary school overweight, with a fifth already obese. Obesity in childhood almost always leads to obesity in adulthood.

The government vowed to produce a game-changing strategy that would make a real difference to our children’s health. Just a few weeks ago, following years of joint working with charities and professionals, it was close to launching this strategy. But now, instead of plans to regulate industry, address unhealthy promotions and stop junk food being advertised on primetime TV, we have a 13-page document with few details, a preponderance of voluntary measures and a blatant disregard for the evidence.

Related: The Tories must tackle the real cause of obesity: inequality | Polly Toynbee

The new prime minister entered Downing Street with a pledge to tackle health inequality and to champion the needs of the individual in preference to the “mighty”. Obesity has a disproportionate impact on the poorest in our society. Health inequalities are some of the starkest in the country, and obesity illustrates that perfectly: the poorer you are, the more likely you are to be obese. The new government faced its first test of this pledge with a chance to address inequality and protect the next generation from diseases such as cancer. This plan fails that test. There can be little doubt that cancer prevention has fallen victim to economic scaremongering and industry lobbying.

Last year I was asked to lead a taskforce which developed a strategy to improve cancer services in the NHS. It was clear that one of the first things we needed to do was to reduce the rapidly growing numbers of people diagnosed with cancers that are preventable. Obesity is second only to smoking as the biggest preventable cause of cancer; action on both is needed to have a real impact on the four in 10 cancers that are preventable. If this country doesn’t start tackling obesity now, we will face a burden of disease that we will be unable to cope with. Cancer Research UK has shown that if nothing is done, obesity could cause 670,000 new cases of cancer over the next 20 years in the UK, and millions more cases of other diseases.

An effective strategy needs to be multi-faceted, since obesity is a complex problem. A strong consensus exists on the range of measures necessary. One critical omission in the latest plan is junk food advertising. Academics, medical professionals and health charities have provided the government with clear evidence: children who see junk food adverts are more likely to eat unhealthy food. And if restrictions were in place before the 9pm watershed, children’s exposure to advertising would be more than halved.

Related: Cancer taskforce tells NHS: get up to date and save 30,000 lives a year

The reasons why these adverts are so successful are clear. A range of tactics is used to promote junk food, including cartoon characters, celebrity endorsement and movie tie-ins. Marketing junk food influences both what food children ask their parents to buy and the brands they prefer – setting them up for a lifetime of unhealthy choices.

Some will say parents should be responsible for what their children eat. Parents clearly have a key role, but as a father I know the pitfalls of pester power and how hard it can be for families to shun the tempting junk and ensure healthy food is always on the table. The bombardment of junk food advertising on TV doesn’t help.

The government readily acknowledges that junk food marketing is a problem. It’s already removed junk food adverts during children’s programming. Public Health England’s evidence review is clear that all forms of marketing influence children.

There are elements of the plan we welcome. It does re-affirm a commitment to the soft drinks industry levy, a measure that is tried, tested and popular – and that we want brought in without delay. Increased exercise and healthier eating in schools is also to be applauded. There is a welcome attempt to reduce the amount of sugar that children consume.

But warm words mean nothing without action. And voluntary commitments with no penalties or enforcement will not protect our next generation from cancers or other illnesses. Nor will they reduce the crippling burden of obesity on the NHS. The chief executive of NHS England has said that obesity could “bankrupt the NHS”. This warning has gone unheeded, and children across the UK will be let down.

This plan was delayed by a year, with the government stating it wanted to look at “everything that contributes to a child becoming overweight and obese”. To ignore the impact of marketing and in-store promotions is inexcusable. We need the game-changing strategy we were promised. As it stands, our children will suffer from a rising tide of ill-health due to obesity well into the future.

May’s obesity ‘plan’ betrays children who face a rising tide of preventable cancer | Harpal Kumar

Lives "left in ruin" by growing tide of depression drugs

Henry — who does not want to reveal his last identify because of pending legal action against the medication companies — is just one of an estimated four million individuals in Britain taking antidepressants, a number that is growing sharply.

Final 12 months, 53 million prescriptions were issued for antidepressants in England alone, practically double the number prescribed a decade ago, and a six per cent increase in the previous year. According to current research, one particular in 3 British girls and 1 in ten guys now get the medicine, like well-known brand names this kind of as Prozac, Cipramil and Seroxat, at some point in their lives.

But a increasing number of authorities now believe depression is vastly overdiagnosed and the drugs can lead to far more harm than excellent.

This week, a new organisation, the Council for Proof-Primarily based Psychiatry (CEP), whose members incorporate psychiatrists, academics and withdrawal charities, is launching, to educate the public about the dangers of antidepressants. A keynote speech will be offered by Prof Peter Gøtzsche, co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, an worldwide, non-revenue organisation that examines huge amounts of medical information to aid physicians and individuals reach informed conclusions about wellness.

Prof Gøtzsche, author of Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Massive Pharma has Corrupted Healthcare, believes that some drug companies have obfuscated the truth about antidepressants, considerably as tobacco companies attempted to hide the dangers of cigarettes.

“My analysis has led me to the unpleasant conclusions that these medication aid very number of men and women. They are usually being taken needlessly and, in numerous instances, ruining lives.

“GPs and psychiatrists hand out these medication for the most unbelievable motives — when patients are obtaining marital issues, have failed exams, split up with their boyfriends — occasions that would make anybody really feel unhappy and stressed but don’t indicate clinical depression.

“In this kind of situations, and also in genuinely depressed patients, the patients will really feel greater anyway with the passing of time, but medical doctors and sufferers attribute their recovery to the antidepressants. When they quit the drugs, withdrawal signs will frequently make them truly feel undesirable. This is often misdiagnosed as the depression not being cured, so they are informed to proceed taking the pills, sometimes for existence.”

Jo Thompson, 31, an NHS researcher, was prescribed antidepressants three many years in the past for nervousness about her university ultimate exams. “What I was going through — worrying about the future and selections I was making — was entirely typical, in retrospect,” she says.

Her GP wrote her a prescription for lorazepam, a potent benzodiazepine or anti-nervousness drug, which are at the moment in vogue, with 16.5 million currently being prescribed in the United kingdom final year, and to which all around a single million men and women are believed to be “accidentally” addicted — in contrast with 300,000 unlawful heroin and crack cocaine addicts.

Miss Thompson took the drugs but rather than feeling calmer, she went “through the roof”. “Within days, normal life became unmanageable,” she says. “I stopped eating. I’m a extremely sociable man or woman but I grew to become a hermit. Any sudden sensation terrified me, to the point where I daren’t step into the shower, so I stopped washing. I imagined I was going mad.

“In my naivety, it by no means occurred to me that they may well be the drugs’ side effects. They had been offered to me by a physician to make me better, so how could they be generating things considerably worse?”

Miss Thompson ended up in hospital. “I was a shivering shell, not sleeping at all,” she says. Increasingly concerned at doctors’ insistence on attempting diverse antidepressants and upping doses, she discharged herself and determined to quit the medicines overnight. As with Henry, and 72 per cent of antidepressant end users surveyed by CEP, doctors had given her no warning about the dangers of “cold turkey” withdrawal from benzodiazepines.

“I had no idea of the horrors that awaited me. Every single second of the day was hell. I was a zombie, but one particular that couldn’t sit down. I just paced up and down, and asked my parents if I was going to die. I couldn’t be left alone. In the vehicle, I was overwhelmed with the urge to throw myself out on to the motorway.”

When Miss Thompson later tackled her GP about his lack of tips, he grew to become really defensive. “He just mumbled about not possessing any training,” she says.

Throughout his time as an NHS psychotherapist, Dr James Davies, co-founder of CEP, was astonished at how freely antidepressants had been handed out. “People have been being medicated fully unnecessarily, when they weren’t suffering from psychological-wellness ailments but from understandable, occasionally even necessary, human expertise.”

Despite the fact that official suggestions is to prescribe antidepressants in conjunction with counselling, in practice prolonged waiting lists imply this rarely transpires.

“It’s cheaper and quicker to prescribe antidepressants than investigate the root cause of sadness,” says Dr Davies. “The other issue is mental well being practitioners are not introduced for the duration of training to the increasing physique of vital investigation on the medication.”

Antidepressants appreciate international recognition (the World Health Organisation just lately warned that antidepressant use in numerous nations had gone “through the roof”, with 1 in 10 men and women in Iceland taking the drugs), but they have been invented only by accident, when scientists looking for a tuberculosis remedy observed, in 1952, that sick people grew to become much more cheerful right after taking the anti-infection medication they were establishing.

No one understood how the medicines worked, but given that mental illnesses were normally tackled by way of partial lobotomies, brain injections or the electroshock treatment method recorded by Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar, a simple pill was hugely interesting.

More than the following decades, drug firms explained that depression was brought on by a chemical imbalance that medicines could remedy. But this theory has never ever been confirmed. “These medicines create a chemical imbalance, which is why it is so difficult for individuals to get off them,” says Prof Gøtzsche.

In fact, he says, there’s small evidence that antidepressants help any person. “In cases of mild depression, their result is tiny. Good [the Nationwide Institute for Health and Care Excellence] recommends that antidepressants are not routinely prescribed for people with mild depression. But even in serious cases, investigation shows only ten per cent of people will come to feel better than if they utilised a placebo.

“Some folks ask me if I’m worried that by pointing this out folks will make a decision to come off their drugs and grow to be extremely sick,” he continues. “But I’m not afraid of that, supplied patients taper off their drug slowly in collaboration with their medical professional. What I’m afraid of is the harm becoming carried out to so several healthy folks.

“Furthermore, there are case reports in individuals and controlled experiments on animals that propose that the drugs could possibly result in long lasting brain damage we are currently learning this.”

Miss Thompson is even now suffering. “Three years have passed, but the ringing in my ears has by no means gone away and I’m so considerably far more anxious than previously about things that would in no way have after concerned me. But when you have survived withdrawal, you are just glad to be alive.”

Nine many years after he began withdrawal, Henry estimates he is only 80 per cent far better and has just returned to perform.

“Last yr, a psychiatrist advised me it’s unlikely I ever had depression at all, I was just run down and needed rest. Because I innocently accepted my GP’s diagnosis, I’ve misplaced twenty years of my existence,” he says.

Lives "left in ruin" by growing tide of depression drugs