Title: The truth about obesity: 10 shocking things you need to know | Life and style | The Guardian
Headings: The truth about obesity: 10 shocking things you need to know
Health & wellbeing
The truth about obesity: 10 shocking things you need to know
Sarah Boseley
1. Nearly two-thirds of the UK population is either overweight or obese
2. Obesity is shortening our lives
3. Obesity could bankrupt the NHS
4. It's an unfair fight
5. Obesity took off in the have-it-all 80s
6. Snacking is "a newly created behaviour"
7. The food industry is behaving as the tobacco industry did
8. Your brain, not your stomach, tells you when to stop eating
9. By the age of five, it is almost too late to intervene
10. Obese children are increasingly being taken into care

Content: more than a fifth of five-year-olds and a third of 11-year-olds are overweight or obese. " Obesity is such that this generation of children could be the first in the history of the United States to live less healthful and shorter lives than their parents," said Dr David S Ludwig, director of the obesity programme at the Children's Hospital Boston and one of the authors of a paper that, in 2005, came to similar conclusions in the New England Journal of Medicine . The proportion of overweight children in the US and the UK is similar. 3. Obesity could bankrupt the NHS
The NHS spends £5bn a year on diseases such as strokes and diabetes that are linked to obesity. Within a few decades, that is predicted to climb to £15bn. Type 2 diabetes is a huge problem: 10% of the NHS budget already goes on that alone. Being overweight is the chief cause and the numbers are soaring, from 1.4 million in 1996 to more than three million today, with a predicted rise to five million by 2025. A study this month revealed that one-third of the population is on the verge of type 2 diabetes, having high blood glucose levels classified as prediabetes. "