Calls for GPs to Push Diets

There have been calls for GPs to start recommending diets to overweight people, and criticism claiming people are too reticent about the obesity crisis.
The government’s chief obesity adviser, Prof. Susan Jebb, made the comparison between obesity and smoking treatments. We have no fear telling people to give up smoking, but we have trouble telling people they should diet.
She proposed a scheme in which GPs pushed for overweight people to diet strategically and attempt to lose 5% of their body weight every 5 years.
Susan Jebb is a professor of diet and population health from Oxford University. She has also announced that fruit juices and other drinks should be removed from the breakfast table and replaced with jugs of water, in an attempt to replace high sugar drinks with zero calorie alternatives.
Prof. Jebb said, regarding her push for GP sponsored 12 week diets on a 5 yearly cycle: “If you think of obesity as a chronic relapsing condition, you could say well maybe every five years you have to diet for 12 weeks – I’m not sure that feels so untenable a position when you think of what we ask people with other chronic diseases to do, whether they are injecting insulin multiple times a day to control their diabetes or whatever… I’m just trying to manage people’s expectations.”
Whether you agree that GPs should be pushing overweight people into dieting or not, the need to lose weight is paramount to living a healthy life for overweight or obese people.