Barry McCarthy

During the recent UK Public Health Association annual forum in Scotland, delegates were huffing and puffing as they hauled themselves up and down the stairs of the multi-storey Edinburgh International Conference Centre.

Many blamed this unplanned bout of exercise on the escalators having broken down as they navigated between sessions. But at the final meeting it was revealed that the moving staircases had in fact been deliberately switched off by event organisers as a gesture of solidarity following an outstanding speech given earlier that day.

Ichiro Kawachi, professor of social epidemiology at Harvard University, was for many the highlight of the two-day conference thanks to his humorous and enlightening talk on obesity. What prompted such drastic action in closing the escalators was one of the professor’s presentation pictures summing up people’s contradictory attitudes towards promoting health.

The image, which showed two escalators leading up to a gym in the USA, provoked laughter from the audience for the obvious paradox it presented. How can someone be serious about losing weight and keeping fit if they avoid exercise at every opportunity? Professor Kawachi didn’t stop there.

He showed other disturbing images including a McDonalds and Burger King in the children’s sections of US hospitals, which ridiculed the efforts of medical staff to cure sick youngsters in one room while they stuffed themselves with junk food in another. He also refused to accept obesity is a genetic problem through a graph, which showed how Americans have become fatter over the past decades. Today 31% of US residents and 23% of Britons are obese.

Maybe it’s just me, but after the professor’s talk it seemed delegates were shunning the biscuits during the breaks in favour of fruit and I, for one, was happy to take the stairs for the rest of the day.