Campaign to tackle UK obesity

A campaign by organisations representing doctors has begun to tackle the rising levels of obesity in the UK.
The campaign will begin by reviewing the case for fat taxes, promoting exercise and restricting some food advertising.

Almost 1 in 4 adults in the UK are obese and predictions indicate that half of children will be obese or overweight by 2020.
This could result in a more severe health issue than those created by HIV and swine flu.

The Royal medical Colleges and faculties represent  200,000 doctors and have described the united campaign as unprecedented.
The doctors groups plan to spend the next three months looking at different solutions and devising a plan to combat the rising obesity problem.

It is not believed that exercise alone will be enough to curb the rise in obesity, as it can take an hour on the treadmill to combat the calories of a single Mars bar.

It is most likely that a similar campaign as that used to deter smoking will be used to push the idea of healthy eating. This could involve a change in the way that people are exposed to advertising and marketing of unhealthy/ junk food and snacks. A tax on certain foods could also be introduced as this has proved to have some success with reducing smoking.

'Never did me any harm...'

Let Them Eat Dirt: How Clean Environments May Set Kids Up for Immune Problems.

With modern plumbing and hygiene, the number of nasty microbes we are exposed to has plummeted, while the rate of auto-immune diseases and allergies has shot up. Are those related?
Proponents of the hygiene hypothesis think so: our immune system is supposed to develop by encountering microbes, so being too clean throws it out of whack as the immune system overreacts to minor insults.

A new study found that mice raised germ-free had especially high numbers of invariant natural killer T cells (iNKT) in their colons and lungs—the mouse versions of inflammatory bowel disease and asthma, respectively. Most evidence supporting the hygiene hypothesis has just been in observed correlations, so this research that identifies a plausible molecular mechanism is good evidence for how over-cleanliness might cause immune dysfunction.

Interestingly, microbial exposure only affected immune system development during a critical period in childhood. Microbial exposure had no effect on the iNKT cells of adult germ-free mice, but it did restore iNKT levels to normal in the offspring of pregnant germ-free mice exposed just before birth.