UK Food Industry Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3250 words - 1

UK Food Industry - Essay Example Obesity can be fuelled by excessive consumption of high-fat food, genetic predisposition, and lack of physical exercise. However, several parties play a role in causing obesity in a certain population. For instance, both the government and business firms determine what type of food the population eats, any unhealthy food with high fat and sugar content will definitely cause obesity (Parkin & Boyd, 2011). This paper seeks to expound on the childhood obesity in the United Kingdom, with a close analysis on the food industry’s corporate social responsibility, focusing on MacDonald restaurants and the role they have played in combating childhood obesity. In the UK, obesity has been declared a crisis since its population is gradually turning obese. For example, a research conducted in 2007 revealed that nearly 25% of all adults were obese. The figure steadily increased in 2012 with 37% of all adults in the UK being obese. This trend seems to escalate so quickly that it is estimated that by 2025 nearly 40% of Britons will be obese with the Body Mass Index greater than 30kg/M ². The figure is even reaching Biblical proportions by 2050 with the speculations of obesity affecting 60% of adult men and 50% of adult females (ParliÅ„ska, A, & Rembielak, 2014). The Foresight Report of 2007 exposed causes of obesity among the UK’s population. These causes were broadly categorized into four groups, the social influences that entail individual habits and psychology, the activity environment focusing of individual’s physical activity practices, biology which basically means the genetic predisposition to obesity and food environment that sums up all types of food consumed as well as their caloric and fat content. Each of these factors plays a role in causing obesity in the UK but the most adamant one is the food environment. Obesity easily becomes a crisis because it is associated with other medical conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, arthritis etc.