Wes Streeting has warned that weight loss jabs should not be used as an excuse to give up healthy living as figures show the country is getting fatter.
The Health Secretary said diet and exercise must continue to play an important role and that obese people should not expect the NHS to ‘pick up the tab’.
Two in three Britons are overweight or obese, and NHS figures show that people weighed around a stone more than 30 years ago.
The average middle-aged man weighs 14 stone and has a 40-inch waist, while women aged 45 to 64 now weigh an average of 12 stone, with a 36-inch waist.
Streeting’s intervention comes as the NHS prepares to roll out weight loss jabs to 1.6 million patients.
Wes Streeting (pictured at Labor conference) warned that diet and exercise must continue to play an important role in people’s lives
The average middle-aged man weighs 14 stone and has a 40 inch waist, while women aged 45 to 64 now weigh an average of 12 stone, with a 36 inch waist (file image)
Mounjaro could help users lose more than a quarter of their body weight in 18 months
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They will be available first to the heaviest and sickest, the government said last week.
Studies have shown that Mounjaro, described as the ‘King Kong’ of fat-burning jabs, can help people lose up to 26 percent of their body weight in 18 months.
Experts say the shots are a crucial weapon in tackling the obesity epidemic, which costs the economy an estimated £27 billion a year in health care and benefits for people out of work.
Mr Streeting told The Sunday Telegraph: ‘Obesity is a huge drag on the NHS, the economy and people’s quality of life, so obesity jabs are an exciting innovation.
‘But we don’t want to encourage a culture of dependency where people think it’s OK not to make the effort to eat healthy or exercise because the NHS will foot the bill and pay for their weight loss.’
He added: ‘People have the right to expect top quality healthcare, but also the responsibility to look after their own health, so we need to get the balance right.’
Obesity is the second most common cause of preventable death after smoking and costs the health service £11.4 billion a year, putting ‘huge pressure on NHS staff and resources’, the Health Secretary has said.
Both Wegovy and Mounjaro injections are approved for obese adults and for people with a body mass index of at least 27 and weight-related health problems.
Dr. Clare Hambling, NHS national clinical director for diabetes and obesity, described the latter as ‘one of the biggest public health issues we face in this country’.
She said action is “urgently needed across society to stem the tide of the rising (obesity) rates of recent decades and prevent so many lives from being shortened.”
