The chicken shop mile and how Britain got fat

With cheap and fattening food everywhere, there has been a shape shift that means people do not
recognise obesity when they see it in the mirror.

The Mile End Road in east London is awash with chicken shops – not places to buy
fresh poultry but takeaways where the oil is always bubbling and everything comes with
chips. One piece of chicken in batter with fries and a can of full-sugar drink for £1.99.
Two pieces for £2.79. There are utilitarian tables inside with red and white plastic
cloths and large containers of ketchup, but many of the customers eat as they wander
home in their school uniform.

In this London borough – Tower Hamlets – one in eight children starting primary
school are obese, and that doubles to more than one in four when they leave, at age 11.
The borough has the fifth-highest rate of child obesity in London and the sixth in the
country.

Sir Sam Everington, a GP, deplores the “chicken shop mile” that begins just a short walk
from his innovative Bromley-by-Bow health centre, where social and psychological
problems are taken as seriously as the diseases that bring people in. There are all sorts
of reasons why people become obese, but the 42 chicken shops per secondary school in
the borough are definitely among them.

The child obesity figures are a disaster, according to Everington, who chairs the
borough’s clinical commissioning group. “It’s a spectrum of malnutrition,” he says over
coffee in the pleasant cafe that is an integral part of the health centre. “My assumption
is that all my children are malnourished.”

One of the world’s most affluent cities has children with problems we assume do not
exist outside the developing world. Malnutrition is not just about starvation. And apart
from the real danger that obesity will lead to heart disease, stroke and cancer in later
life, the diet children are eating also leads to vitamin deficiencies and mouths full of
rotten teeth.

For the NHS, this scenario is devastating. Even now, type 2 diabetes – which is linked
to obesity – consumes nearly a 10th of the annual budget. There is some evidence that
the rise in obesity in children nationally may have hit a plateau, but it is stabilising, not
dropping. And weight – particularly in adults but also in children – is very hard to shift,
thanks to our inbuilt biological defences. Our metabolism dramatically slows weight
loss after a couple of months to prevent us starving to death.

Obesity is “the new smoking”, Simon Stevens, NHS England’s chief executive, has told
the Guardian. “It represents a slow-motion car crash in terms of avoidable illness and
rising healthcare costs. If as a nation we keep piling on the pounds around the
waistline, we’ll be piling on the pounds in terms of future taxes needed just to keep the
NHS afloat.”