Obesity warning on London buses

9:39am Monday 8th March 2004

Overweight Londoners are to be warned about the risks of obesity from today, with blunt advertisements on the back of buses.

The message 'Don't look like the back end of a bus' will be carried across ads on buses on busy routes, together with a rear view of an overweight man.

The campaign is being run by the World Cancer Research Fund UK, with the aim of 'shocking' people into thinking about their eating and exercise habits.

"It's not just the overweight who need to take notice - people who aren't yet overweight need to think about how to avoid gaining weight in the first place," says Professor Martin Wiseman, Medical and Scientific Adviser to WCRF UK.

"Losing weight and keeping it off is really hard, so prevention is the key."

The WCRF campaign comes amid rising concern about excess weight and levels of obesity.

Recent figures have shown about eight million, or one in every five, Britons are overweight or obese.

The so-called obesity epidemic has been blamed on the increasing size of meal portions and reduced exercise habits.

These twin problems have combined to make obesity a serious health threat, with obese people more at risk to cancer, heart disease and other chronic illnesses.

The WCRF is a charity organization that works on the prevention of cancer, aiming to reduce the number of people in the UK being diagnosed with cancer every year.