Health: Obesity

Lord Addington Excerpts

Monday 4th April 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord McColl, is consistent. I remember that we have crossed swords on this subject several times. The idea that exercise is a bad way of controlling weight is odd because fundamentally it misses the point. Exercise may make you gain weight. If you take exercise that uses muscle—for instance, my own sport of rugby union or rowing—you will get bigger. If you take these exercises your body will become more dense and solid; if you run, your body will become more solid and you will add extra muscle. The old adage is that if you go to the butchers and ask for a pound of fat and a pound of muscle you will discover which is the smaller unit—it is just there.

We can jump around here but the idea is that you are carrying too much fat. The body mass index is probably the worst measure of obesity and fitness because it throws up the anomaly of the sportsman emerging as the person who is going to die tomorrow. According to the body mass index, I did not make it to 30; neither did anyone else who played my sport at any level; and when Pinsent and Redgrave won their last combined gold medal they were heavily overweight and just missed being obese. These men are six foot five, so you can see how bad it is.

I am aware that I have an inferior medical knowledge but burning fat is probably the worst way to judge the way in which you use calories in exercise—I know I am sticking my neck out in saying this—because you burn up the calories when your body repairs the muscles, over a longer period of time, after exercise has put up your metabolism. This is fundamentally what your body does and different types of exercise will burn it at different rates.

It is also true that you have to take account of the number of calories going in and the number going out. If you live a sedentary life, it is absolutely obvious that you do not need extra calories. Exercise burns up calories, basically by rebuilding, reconditioning or changing muscle. You might burn off 15 calories by keeping fit in the gym but if, for example, you lift weights, you will burn off far more calories by rebuilding your muscles afterwards. However, if you are heavily overweight and eat far too much or eat the wrong thing sat in front of a TV screen, you are going to get heavier.

The fact is that, if we do not take exercise and we sit in front of a TV screen, the vast majority of us will eat or drink cups of tea laced with sugar. The same point applies to sugar in tea as it does to sugar in alcohol. If we spend a great deal of time being sedentary, most of us will consume calories at the same time. Many of us do not have the will-power to sit still for hours doing nothing without consuming calories. We live in a society where these no-need-to-cook, at-your-fingertips calories are easily available: you go to a supermarket and, after you have been good and bought the things that you have to cook, you buy lots of things that you do not have to cook. That is one of the barriers that we face.

How do we try to bring about a balance? The Government’s responsibility deal is a way forward, and I hope that we can get a bit more out of that than we have from some of the other schemes that we have had in the past. Primarily, we are not asking everyone to stop eating convenience foods, but we are trying to make those convenience foods potentially less lethal. However, how this will work, I do not know. Improvements have been made but are they happening quickly enough? There is no silver bullet. The previous Government tried hard to tackle the problem. They made people look at the problem but people still tend to be getting heavier, so which combination is right?

Total abstemiousness may be desirable but it is not something that we follow. Let us face it: we would not have to maintain sports grounds if we all did. Fast food is available to us and it has always been a part of our culture. History shows us that fish and chip shops and pie shops have always been there. All the things we like, such as salt and fat, are available and they give us a nice hit. We have to take that on board and try to educate people further. If people like these types of snacks, we have to try to make them less fatty.

Exercise plays a very important part for many people. If you are active and a reasonably keen amateur sportsman, then, apart from anything else, you are probably going to take slightly better care of yourself. Why would you not do so? Even if you only want to get from the third to the second team in your particular sport, then losing a couple of pounds and eating slightly better may have a part to play in that. When you are playing or running around training one, two or three nights a week, you are not sitting on your behind in front of a TV screen or in the pub. We must look at the issue in the round. The incentive to control your diet is increased by exercise. If you do not eat a great deal and are not carrying an extra few pounds of fairly soft tissue or fat, then, even if you just want to walk gently up a hill on a Sunday, it will be easier and more fun. Everyone enjoys the view more when they are not gasping for breath at the end of their walk and do not have incredible pain in their muscles. That is a fact.

I repeat: we have to look at things in the round. Physical activity and access to physical activity will help, if only as an incentive to eat better. Unless we make sure that that there are incentives to take part in social and physical activity and to think about the foods that we eat and the amount we eat, we are going to miss our targets. Let us make sure that, when we talk about diet, we talk about it in terms not just of consumption of calories but of the correct cycle of calories for activity.

I leave noble Lords with this. Everybody is gobsmacked by professional athletes—not by the amount they train but by the amount they eat. An Olympic gold medallist—I think it was Phelps in the last Olympics—said that he had to eat 4,000 calories a day. That is eight gold medals-worth of burgers. It means that people can actually eat a great deal and be very fit and healthy. I suggest that we need to look at this in the round and not get obsessed by any one activity.

[Lord McColl of Dulwich]

Before the noble Lord sits down, would he recognise that I did not actually run down exercise? I specifically said it was a good thing. Also, how does he explain the scientific fact that only one-fifth of the calories we eat are expended in exercise?

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, quite simply, if it is expended in exercise, it is not expended in the rebuilding of muscle. Rebuilding muscle is an important part of exercise—not the actual taking of exercise.

Contaminated Blood (Support for Infected and Bereaved Persons) Bill [HL]

Lord Addington Excerpts

Friday 22nd October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, for those who speak this far down the list, not much remains to be said and most of it will be repetitious. However, we should congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Morris, on consistently coming back to this issue. He has worked on disability issues for a long time. If there is a bulldog spirit in this House—a tenacious person—he embodies it totally. It is probably worth putting on the record again the fact that he has not thought twice about hitting his own party’s Ministers hard and often. He has shown no fear about that. Party loyalty has not got in the way of his raising the issue.

I hope that the Government do not defend their position with a series of Treasury Bench-type responses, such as, “We don’t have to pay this out so we won’t”. I am afraid that previous Ministers have given such responses. I hope that we get some answers. If we cannot accept the Bill in its entirety, what can be done? That is a very important question. Moreover, what will be done in a certain phase of time? If we can find out when something will happen—Christmas has been mentioned—and what exactly that is, the degree of certainty and knowledge will help those involved. We can argue about exact details later, but that certainty would be something.

What initially got me involved in this issue, a good few years ago, was the difference in the way that we treated two groups of people—I refer to those affected by hepatitis C and HIV—who had contracted very similar conditions through a very similar process. However, because of a legal defence position, one group did not receive help. Surely we can address that at the first opportunity. If we carry on like this, we will carry on having similar debates and wasting time, leaving the people affected scrabbling in the air, waiting for something to happen and grabbing on to hope and despair. That affects their lives as well and piles not insult on insult but injury on injury. I hope that the noble Earl will be able to give us a positive response as the whole House and the entire political system deserve to be given a clear answer. If this is not the final measure that we seek, at least I hope that it will not leave us demanding a sequel.

Queen's Speech

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 3rd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, coming in at number 35 in the batting order, I am surprised to discover that I have something to say which has not been covered already. That does not often happen in a debate such as this; you usually have to quote everybody in front of you.

I shall refer first to the education aspect of the debate. Before doing so, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Hill, to the cross between Alice in Wonderland and Gormenghast which is how I have always regarded the House of Lords. He is welcome as a noble friend—something that I did not expect on 6 May to be saying. I hope that he will carry on in the same vein as that in which he started.

The coalition document refers to assessment for all pupils with special educational needs, which most people involved in the field have concluded is absolutely necessary. It will be important to make sure that we hit targets for improved literacy, for example. The previous Government, to give them their due, did throw resources at this problem and found out that we were not getting to the group of people with such things as dyslexia, which is a special interest of mine. Too many people were still not being identified or treated properly when they got through. The other hidden disabilities are as bad. What usually happens here, as the noble Lord will discover, is that the most extreme cases are dealt with first, provided that you have an articulate parent behind you. That is the absolute iron law. The organisations that do the work behind this are driven by those articulate parents. Dyslexic people from working class backgrounds, who often have dyslexic parents and dyslexic children, end up with people with dyslexia in prison. That would be roughly what I would say about it. We need to ensure that the assessment works and is given the time, place and energy and is made to cover all these conditions. The assessment may be a complicated one that takes several days or weeks, but it must be done in that way. If you miss this target, you will miss an opportunity. I shall come back to this at a later date—probably on a lot of later dates. I think noble Lords are nodding their heads in agreement. It is something that we must look at, and I encourage the noble Lord to engage fully with all the organisations out there. I hope that we can make a good fist of it. There is no right answer, but there may well be a better one in this field.

I turn to the link between culture and health. The noble Lord will not be surprised if I say that the linkage between sports and physical activity and health is absolutely obvious, but government has never really got hold of it. The idea is there, but we do not really correlate the two properly. The coalition document mentions helping sports clubs; something has been done, but not enough. I recommend the Bill that I brought forward on amateur sports clubs, and would like to take credit for all the drafting, but the CCPR would have my hide if I did. We do not give enough support to those taking sport outside school, in encouraging them to take it on after that.

I am worried by one of the other comments in the document that refers to school sports. One thing that we know about sporting activity is that it drops off at 16, 18 and 21. Those happen to be the dates at which people leave educational institutions. If you are fit as a flea at 15 and a fat slob at 22, the NHS ain’t going to get a great deal of benefit. How do you encourage people? I asked the previous Government and the Government before that. The noble Earl, Lord Howe, and I have been noble friends and allies and noble opponents in this House. What is the best form of recruitment devised by all the sporting bodies supported by Sport England to keep people involved? I have had long and in-depth replies but I have never found out the best answer. How can we keep people engaged and active in sporting activity? People will then turn round and say that people can be healthy without playing a competitive sport. One in several thousand may have the motivation to do the 2.3 miles of jogging two to three times a week to keep their weight at the recommended level over a long period of time, but nobody else will. You need an incentive and a reason to get yourself involved; even if it is only to look good on the beach, you need a reason. It is easier to eat chips. The answer will not always be found in eating healthier food. You can get fat eating healthy food and watching TV. It might take slightly longer, but you can still do it. We need to give people an incentive to get involved. Will the Government ensure that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department of Health have regular meetings and discussions about how they can marry these two things together to ensure that there is some real interaction? I know that effort was put in before, but it seemed to disappear somewhere behind the Chinese walls. I do not doubt that many Ministers tried—they probably ended up wasting a great deal of time with my pushing to get this on—but please can they make a move through with a linkage that goes slightly further than Ministers saying occasionally, “Oh, we must do something”. It happens that things fall away occasionally between Ministers who are supposed to meet each other.

If we are talking about protecting school playing fields in this document, please can somebody also address the fact that that battle might have been lost? It took 10 years for the previous Government to reverse their sell-off of school playing fields. Maybe they could have acted sooner, but they did not. They slowed it down, but did not reverse it. I think there was a great announcement, after about 10 years of asking this question, saying, “Finally, we’ve got two more than we had last year”. Can we have a real addressing of the facilities available across the board for people to take on sport? Can we also look not just at school playing fields but at local authority and private playing fields? I asked that several times and it was never measured. Can we look at this in the round?

Finally, on the Department of Health, if we are encouraging people to play sport and take exercise, can the noble Earl, Lord Howe, tell me whether we are doing more about making better sport and exercise medicine available? That is because soft-tissue injuries which are not dealt with properly become chronic, leading to the person becoming less active—indeed, often, to them becoming disabled. It is an absolute fact that this happens. The process is slow; physiotherapy is slow to acquire. Instant treatment often solves problems overnight. Leaving them for several weeks means you have major problems requiring major involvement; I have case studies on that by the barrow load. I will not bore the House with those tonight, but unless something is done to bring these facets together, all the activity around the Olympics and other great sporting events will not achieve anything like it could. I would hope that, on my two questions, both noble Lords will go away and remember that they must talk to their colleagues and to the rest of the House to maintain pressure for this.