15 Oct 2024 Weight loss jabs to help jobless living with obesity … but let’s not forget healthy living.

Weight loss jabs to help jobless living with obesity return to work but let’s not forget healthy living.

BANT supports Health Secretary, Wes Streeting when he says, “people need to take “healthy living more seriously”.

New plans to tackle obesity with a real-world trial of weight-loss injections impact on worklessness have been revealed, with the goal to get people back in employment and ease the financial burden on the health service.

Whilst BANT remains cautious about the ethical and financial considerations to such an approach, we agree with Streeting that “the NHS can’t be expected to always pick up the tab for unhealthy lifestyles”.

BANT maintains its position that diet and lifestyle has a critical role to play in managing the UK’s obesity epidemic. Proposing potentially life-long weight-loss jabs without addressing the up-stream contributory factors of obesity will impact the efficacy of this proposal.

Earlier this year, BANT published its Manifesto in which we call for policy to educate the nation about healthy eating, increased funding for prevention, legislation on food labelling, measures to tackle ultra-processed foods and drinks as one of the leading drivers of obesity and perhaps most critically, provision for nutrition practitioners within the NHS.

BANT recognises that drugs such as Ozempic and Mounjaro have a role to play in public health but in the words of Streeting “as a country, we’re eating more, eating less healthily and exercising less”. This is the root cause of the UK’s worsening health crisis.

BANT will continue to advocate to treat the cause, and not just the effects of obesity.