Shropshire health expert Dr Kevin Lewis is optimistic he can tackle the obesity problem and persuade us to adopt healthier lifestyles. He talks to Dave Morris.

On the eve of the biggest feast of the year, one man is not quite sure whether he’ll be able to stomach the Christmas turkey.
As tens of thousands of us across the county look forward to Friday’s festive fare – not to mention gallons of seasonal spirits – Dr Kevin Lewis will be worrying about how that will affect our collective waistline.
The health expert, who was behind Shropshire’s successful Help 2 Quit service for smokers is facing another major challenge – defusing an £80 million obesity timetomb that is ticking away in the county.
That will be the annual cost to the NHS in Shropshire by 2015 of treating diseases triggered by obesity, health bosses are warning.
With youngsters eating more unhealthy foods than ever before, with portion sizes increasing to gargantuan proportions and with more and more shoppers taking advantage of two-for-one offers, when one would be more than enough, we’re getting fatter and fatter. Add to that the fact that fewer and fewer of us are taking enough exercise to blitz those extra calories and the picture is pretty grim.
But Dr Lewis doesn’t believe that the situation is hopeless. He is optimistic that many more people can be persuaded, with support, to adopt a healthier lifestyle.
It is going to be a huge task – a recent report to Shirehall leaders revealed that 80 per cent of Shropshire adults are not taking enough exercise to stay healthy.
Two thirds of the county’s adult population is overweight, one quarter is defined as obese.
And it’s easy to see the problems being stored up for Shropshire’s health service.
Obesity is associated with a range of clinical complications such as Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, coronary heart disease, stroke, liver disease, arthritis and depression.
“The obesity problem feels like smoking did to me 15 years ago with Help 2 Quit,” says Dr Lewis, director of the Help to Change programme at Shropshire County Primary Care Trust.
“A lot needed to be done to tackle smoking. It was something that patients and clinicians wanted to see happen but services hadn’t caught up.
“It is the same with obesity. We have been watching it happen and now we have a situation where it is a very serious challenge and a really serious risk to people’s health.
“There are people who say ‘I am a happy fat person’, but they need to understand that there are significant health risks to being overweight and obese.
“We have to help people make positive lifestyle changes.”
Underlying the problem is poor diet and lack of physical exercise. High-calorie foods are cheap, readily available, and strongly promoted by manufacturers.
The problem is not specific to Shropshire. Across the UK, health authorities and health promotion teams are working hard to make us slimmer. They are concerned that health services will creak under the strain of obesity-induced illnesses as we get older. And they want to act now to help us to stay healthier for longer and avoid putting unnecessary strain on hospital wards and doctors’ surgeries.
Closer to home, Dr Lewis believes that the principles which have guided Help 2 Quit, and the lessons learned from the programme, can be applied to tackling overweight and obesity.
The requirement for lifestyle change is as fundamental for obesity as it is for smoking.
A pilot Help 2 Slim service, modelled on Help 2 Quit, has been running in some Shropshire GP practices. It involves practices having someone to whom they can refer their overweight patients for help and support and there are plans to roll out the initiative countywide.
“Most overweight people would like the chance to lose weight if they were offered the chance to do so,” says Dr Lewis.
Under the pilot scheme, nurses trained in weight management, have helped patients on a one-to-one basis.
“We saw 220 people and had a very good success rate. We thought it a very viable programme,” claims Dr Lewis.
But he acknowledges that people are “open to temptation all the time” and like a “quick fix” of chocolate or junk food.
However, he points out, someone taking in 100 excess calories a day, are going to gain five kilogrammes of weight over a year – and 25 kilogrammes over five years is going to make them clinically obese.
As an illustration of how foods have changed, 20 years a burger contained 333 calories but today the figure is 590.
“You would have to lift weights for one and half hours to burn off those additional calories,” adds Dr Lewis.
He has a “well founded optimism” that the current obesity levels can be tackled successfully.
But he warns, that unless action is taken we face a “significant public health disaster”.