Prof Susan Jebb and Prof Sir Charles Godfray in conversation: "Rethinking diet, weight and health policy in and after the COVID-19 pandemic"

20 November 2020

Portrait of Professor Susan Jebb

with Professor Susan Jebb
 Professor of Diet and Population Health

Professor Jebb co-leads the Wellcome Trust-funded LEAP project. As a nutrition scientist her research interests are focused on how what we eat affects the risk of gaining weight or becoming obese and the interventions that might be effective to help ...

Portrait of Professor Sir Charles Godfray

with Professor Sir Charles Godfray
 Director, Oxford Martin School

Professor Charles Godfray was appointed Director of the Oxford Martin School on 1 February 2018. He is a population biologist with broad interests in the environmental sciences and has published in fundamental and applied areas of ecology, evolution...

The current covid-19 pandemic has focussed attention on the variability in personal risk of serious illness. After age and ethnicity, one of the most important factors associated with developing serious covid complications, requiring admission to hospital or ICU, is being overweight.

Excess weight has long been known to be a risk factor for ill-health, though governments have rarely encouraged weight loss, and have even been cautious about interventions which may help to prevent obesity developing, for fear of accusations of ‘nannying’ or because of opposition by the food industry. However covid-19 seems to have sparked a notable change. In the United Kingdom, the Prime Minister, who acknowledges he is overweight, suffered complications from covid-19, and since his recovery has launched a new government plan to tackle obesity. This offers more support to people trying to lose weight and promises much greater action to curb unhealthy eating habits.

Professor Susan Jebb is a nutrition scientist with a special interest in designing and testing public health interventions to prevent and treat obesity. In this conversation, we shall explore the policy options available to governments and other bodies to tackle obesity and ask whether, as we emerge from the pandemic, there will be a new focus on the benefits of a healthy body weight.