Outgoing Chief Medical Officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies has released an independent report, which argues that childhood obesity is solvable, and all children have the right to live healthy active lives.

Professor Davies makes several recommendations, including:

  • Rebalance the food and drinks sold to favour healthy options, through regulation.
  • Allow children to grow up free from marketing, signals and incentives to consume unhealthy food and drinks.
  • Introduce innovative policies that find the win-wins for children’s health and the private sector
  • Invest in and design the built environment to create the opportunities for children to be active and healthy
  • Take action to improve: exercise and healthy weight in pregnancy, breastfeeding rates, and infant feeding.
  • Ensure schools and nurseries play a central role, supported by Ofsted monitoring.
  • Ensure our NHS and health sector workforce can deliver what our children and families need to prevent, manage and treat obesity, including having conversations about weight and tackling weight-related stigma.
  • Make better use of data to guide practice
  • Protect and prioritise our children’s health and rights while making trade deals. Their health and a healthy environment must come above company profits.
  • Develop the evidence base to inform practice and policy.

She warns the government that we are nowhere near achieving government ambitions to halve childhood obesity by 2030, urging further 'bold action'. The report also addresses the shocking state of children’s teeth.

Dr Saul Konviser from the Dental Wellness Trust says: 'Whilst we fully welcome the report by Professor Dame Sally Davies, it’s shocking to be reminded that in 2017/18 in England, 38,385 children, equivalent to 13 school buses every week, underwent the trauma of being put to sleep for a general anaesthetic from having rotten teeth pulled out – mainly caused by excess sugar in food and drink. Although The Soft Drinks Industry Levy has proved a success in reducing the amount of sugar in children’s soft drinks, we still need to see specific win-win activations that help fight tooth decay – in addition to obesity and Type 2 Diabetes.

'Strategies such as oral health prevention and toothbrushing programmes in schools and nurseries are one way of fixing this long overdue “prevention better than cure” ethos and we call on the government for more urgent funding and support.'

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