9th March 2026

Newsletter Monday

Hello Reader,

This week England’s Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, said something that will probably irritate both sides of the obesity debate.

He said that relying on weight-loss injections to solve obesity would represent a societal failure.

That comment will annoy people for different reasons.

Some will hear it as criticism of GLP-1 drugs.

It isn’t.

These medications are life-changing for some individuals. I work with people who use them and do very well.

But Whitty wasn’t really talking about individuals.

He was talking about the environment we’ve built around them.

And I saw a small example of that this week.

Leicester, 8:30am

I was in Leicester city centre early on Saturday morning.

Thirty years ago, if you walked through the city at 8:30 on a Saturday, the market would already be in full swing.

Fruit and veg stalls.

Traders shouting prices.

It was one of the things Leicester was famous for, not least because of Gary Lineker's link to it.

It is a completely different scene now.

Much of the market has gone.

Instead the surrounding streets are lined with takeaways.

Chicken shops.

Kebab places.

More chicken shops.

Now before anyone gets defensive, I enjoy a takeaway as much as the next person. A Friday night kebab has never required moral justification in my house.

But the sheer number of them was striking.

It made me feel sad.

You can genuinely walk past twenty-five chicken shops before finding somewhere selling a piece of fruit.

(Smoothies don’t count. That’s dessert with a blender.)

There was also something else noticeable.

The damn litter is everywhere too.

How this actually happens

Takeaways don’t appear by accident.

They appear because planning permission is granted.

Local councils approve them.

And this is where things get interesting.

Those same councils also:

run public health programmes
fund social care
now sit inside integrated care systems alongside the NHS

Integrated Care Boards - if you’ve never heard of them - were designed to bring health services and local government together to improve population health.

Which sounds sensible.

Except we often end up with a strange contradiction.

The same system trying to reduce obesity is also approving the food environment that encourages it.

The nudge problem

Whitty made another point that’s easy to overlook.

In some parts of the UK, fast food isn’t just an option.

It’s almost the only option.

If you work shifts, finish late, or don’t drive, the loudest and easiest food around you may well be fried chicken on every corner.

That’s not really a question of willpower.

It’s a question of availability.

Other countries organise their food environments very differently.

Which is part of the reason Whitty often points to places like France when discussing obesity trends.

The strange position we’re in

At the same time, medicine is developing increasingly effective treatments for obesity.

GLP-1 medications reduce appetite and help people lose significant weight.

They are powerful tools.

I am glad they exist.

But they aren't addressing the problem that our environment is still actively producing.

Which is why Whitty’s comment was less about drugs and more about the bigger picture.

Is the long-term plan really to:

Allow the environment to drive obesity…

and then medicate the consequences?

The question worth asking

I’ve never met a single person who has looked at a street full of takeaways and said:

“Eight fried chicken shops within two streets is exactly what this area needs.”

And yet that’s the reality in many parts of the country.

These things don’t appear overnight.

They’re the result of planning decisions, commercial pressure all nudging in the same direction.

But for most of us, unless we fancy a career change and a seat on the local council, it can feel like those decisions are happening somewhere far away from us.

Meanwhile the food environment around us keeps getting louder.