Empowering Healthy Kids Blog

Gordon Brown jumps on the bandwagon:

Speaking on a visit to a school in south London, the prime minister said that although the government has invested £2.3bn in physical education over the last 10 years, more needs to be done.

Brown announced an extra £100m this year to try to broaden the range of sports available to children as a new survey revealed a worrying predicted rise in levels of obesity in the UK.

It suggested that 86 per cent of men will be obese in 15 years’ time, and 70 per cent of women will be obese in 20 years’ time.

The prime minister said more needed to be done on food labelling to help parents make the right decisions for their children.

“I want to see a young nation growing up that’s healthy and fit.

“Sometimes if you don’t deal with the problem quickly… then it just grows and grows and grows and gets worse,” he said.

On obesity the prime minister added: “It’s a huge problem and we’ve got to deal with it in a number of different ways.

“There are more school playing fields now. There is a wider range of sport in schools. Girls might be more interested in netball and yoga. It’s one of the answers to childhood obesity.

“When I was at school, one child in the class was very fat and it was a problem for them. Now there are four or five in the class and it’s a big problem for them.”

It will be interesting to track the long-term effects of these kinds of policy to ensure that it actually makes a difference to the rates of childhood obesity.

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 11:30 am and is filed under uk, funding, news, childhood obesity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.