Report on women's health by the Chief Medical Officer

Actually Katek a spoonful of healthy oil is apparently a good idea - I read (studied) a nutritionist's guide many years ago and she said she had found that people cut fat out of their diet in an attempt to lose weight; they reached a certain plateau and then stuck. Adding good oil to their diet helped re-start the weight loss and they reached a healthy weight.

Katy what thread did you think you were on?

That's just it though jingl there was always one fat lady in the village and one fat girl at school (I can even name her 60 years on) now it's everywhere.

I really and truly don't want to hurt people's feelings but if we could solve this epidemic, not only would it help society, and the NHS but these individuals would feel so much better physically and emotionally.

Whoops! Wrong thread......!

My dietician friend recommends a tablespoon of oil in your daily diet to help with constipation. You can use it in salad dressing, stir fry, roast veg etc. A hearty bowl of porridge for brekky also helps.

There have always been fat people. Of course there have. I can remember a family living near us when I was a child. They were as poor as church mouse and yet the mother of the family was huge whilst the husband and sons were thin. How did that happen? There could certainly have been no over-eating there.

There are also a host of group photographs form a few decades back that reveal that people were thinner then than they are now. Take a look at your school photos if you have them M0nica. In mine there are no girls that are even slightly chubby looking. Not one.

rose

We are talking about the population in generl Monica not those few with a diagnosed disorder.

Most fat people eat too much, and by too much I mean too much for their particular metabolism. My daughter suffers from an underactive thyroid which does not respond well to medication, but she is quite slim because she moderates her diet, quite radically.

But in general people are in denial, and we've heard all these reasons before and, to be frank, most of them are excuses trotted out by those who have no medical conditions. The population is getting fatter and fatter, and NOT because they are suddenly all developing some metabolic disorder.

No, Anya, there are a number of reasons why people get fat and over eating is only one of them.

There are a number of illnesses like polycystic ovarian disease and other metabolic diseases that causes obesity, some drugs cause obesity, certain genetic markers are connected with obesity. There is a host of medical literature examining the causes of obesity and the reason some people both gain weight very easily and find it very difficult to lose it.

I feel so stressed now I must go and have some chocolate.

My post was in reply to roses, obviously!

That would seem to make sense. However, the more obese a person is the less exercise they can actually do.

There must be a tipping-point (no pun intended!) where the good effects of diet and moderate exercise are outweighed by the bad effects of obesity.

For heavens sake, here we go again.

Eating too much makes people fat. It is that simple. There might be 'many and various' reasons for eating too much but that's another issue.

Some research I saw several years ago suggested that if an obese person had a healthy diet and was physically active their health and life expectancy were no different from people who were not obese.

I saw a report on that not long ago as well M0nica. I think the reports were quite conclusive.

This the whole point Anya, taking a whole group and doing the 'one size fits all' for cause and effect. Life isn't that simple. The causes for overweight and over-eating are many and various and you have to treat those before you can expect people to lose weight. Your argument is akin with those whose reaction to people suffering from depreression was that they should buck themselves up and snap out of it. We now appreciate that to treat depression we need to get to the underlying causes and treat those

I write as someone who is not overweight, so I am not self-defensive on this issue.

Whenever someone suggests people should try to be a healthy weight there is this outcry.

Everywhere I look I see overweight people and obese people. I know some lovely people who are very fat, so this is nothing against the person but the body they have built around themselves.

Even fat people know they are too fat and would probably like to weigh less, if it wasn't so hard.

We all know the link between obesity and tyoe 2 diabetes. We all know it costs the NHD £1,000,000 every hour and could bring the NHS to bankruptcy, but hey ho! don't dare suggest that obesity is caused by eating too much and if people would take themselves seriously in hand they could shed the pounds.

I hate this mini iPad. With a sodding vengeance.

I guess that there's a huge difference between women who are healthy and exercise sufficiently and those who are overweight because they eat junk food and don't exercise. Not fair that the former are branded in the same way, but the latter [imo] are a ticking time bomb. When I'm out and about I do notice these days how overweight a hell of a lot of people are .

When pressure is put on a system from one direction, an effect will be felt somewhere else.
If you set a target that all patients must be treated within a time frame, and the number of patients increases, the only way you can meet that timeframe is either by increasing the number of surgeons operating, or decrease the time the existing number of surgeons spend on the individual patient.
In the context of the NHS, which scenario is more likely?

If the targets were quality related (better survival outcomes for patients) instead of time related, then more time has to be bought, through employing more staff, to allow sufficient time to be spent to do the job properly.

Yes. But what a miserable distended. Always wanting to chew your own arm.

That certainly does sound odd. Personally I think that ovarian and breast cancer have poorer outcomes because of the poor follow-up. I know two people with this and one gets regular checks with full body scans if there is a hint of a change in blood test results; the other is called in every couple of years and asked if she feels OK and if she says Yes she is sent off home.

"Longer operating times" - what the heck is that about? Is she suggesting that surgeons stop what they are doing and don't bother to remove all the tumour because they are late for the golf course? They might of course be under pressure from targets; but it is unimaginable that they would only do half a job on a patient on the table in front of them.

I find that part of the report a bit alarming too jane why on earth would they hurry with something so dangerous.

There's also evidence that both animals and human beings who have a restricted calorie intake have a longer life expectancy Lucky.
I think it's a pity that the headlines and the comment on here so far have been restricted to the Chief MO's comments about obesity.
She also called for much better therapy for those (mainly girls and women) who suffer with eating disorders - good.
Then there were her comments about the treatment of ovarian cancer.
"The report also called for better treatment for ovarian cancer, which kills more women in England than any other gynaecological cancer.
With survival from the cancer among the lowest among developed nations, Dame Sally recommends longer operating times to increase the likelihood that all the cancer is removed during surgery."

What on earth is that about? We have low survival rates in this country because the surgeons don't take long enough to completely remove tumours?
I'd to know a lot more about whether this assertion is backed up by evidence.

There was some research (can't find it now!) that suggested that being too think in middle and older age was not good for you either.