Eat junk food now, pay the price later

We hear about ourselves, Americans, all the time. I don't think I knew that this was true about the British, as well.

by Sarah Boseley at The Guardian (in the UK), but I found it at the Week in the February 12th edition.

Our atrocious eating habits are going to bankrupt the nation, said Sarah Boseley. In one London borough, Tower Hamlets, one in four kids is obese by age 11—and it’s easy to see why. In that district, home to a street known as the “chicken-shop mile,” fried chicken shops outnumber high schools 42 to one. A vitamin-free diet of fat, grease, and sugary soda leaves the neighborhood’s children both overweight and undernourished. Later in life, those same kids will be at heightened risk of heart disease and cancer. That’s a problem not just for them, but for all of us, because our taxpayer-funded National Health Service will have to treat them. Already, more than 65 percent of English men are obese. “If as a nation we keep piling on the pounds around the waistline,” says NHS England director Simon Stevens, “we’ll be piling on the pounds in terms of future taxes needed just to keep the NHS afloat.” Already, Britain spends more on obesity-related health care than on the police, the fire service, prisons, and the entire criminal justice system combined. It’s no longer enough to have a health-care system that simply treats obese people’s illnesses. The government must do something to stop them from getting fat in the first place.