Over the past 20 years the levels of obesity in children and adults in this country have escalated. It is now estimated that one in three children are overweight and one in five are obese. One child in ten is obese by the time they start school.
The numbers of overweight and obese children in Britain doubled between the early 1980s and late 1990s. In a study of 2,600 children in England, the researchers found so many overweight and obese children in all the age categories that they described their findings as an 'epidemic of obesity in children in the UK' (Reilly, 1999).
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