Diolch. Thank you very much, acting Presiding Officer. I've chosen the topic of 'Is obesity a disease?' (a) because today is World Obesity Day, (b) because today the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health reports that obesity continues to rise, and it remains the case that over one in four four and five-year-olds are obese—a pretty damning and sobering fact. And thirdly, when I met Novo Nordisk last week—a pharmaceutical company best known for their work on diabetes—I was asked whether I considered obesity to be a disease, and I said I'd need to think about it and get back to them. The reason for my reticence is that I was reluctant to medicalise what I've always seen as a social, political and economic problem, generated by an obesogencic food industry, and the overbearing dominance of the motor car over the last 60 years.

So, what is obesity? It may be rather hard for you to read but I'm very grateful to Rachel Batterham, who's the professor of obesity at University College London, for allowing me to use some of the slides from her recent presentation to the Royal College of Physicians, who, as you may recall, are the organisation that have led the way on getting the ban on smoking, and are also campaigning very, very hard on getting a ban on ensuring that we deal with the alcohol industry as well. So, the Royal College of Physicians is an important organisation. Anyway, the definition of obesity, which is a worldwide problem, is a disease in which excess body fat has accumulated to such an extent that health may be adversely affected.

It isn't just an inconvenience—obesity actually shortens your life by between three and 10 years. Obesity prevents people from living well, and we spend 10 per cent of the NHS budget alone on supporting people with diabetes. You may not be able to read the slide, but it doesn't just cause diabetes of the type 2 variety, but also cardiovascular disease, stroke, high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, and heart failure, and many other things besides, including infertility, incontinence, depression, anxiety and asthma.

Few people would argue, then, against the need to reduce obesity, given its life-threatening impact. Indeed, it has the capacity, in my view, to overwhelm the national health service. Now, the answer apparently is simple: if we eat less and exercise more, we get a proper energy balance, and we retain the right weight for our size. In the 1940s, the health advice was to sleep at least eight hours a day, ensure you do recreation—i.e. a complete change from the daily work, for the body and mind—the right food in the right quantities, and regular exercise. And that, during the second world war, was when the population was at its healthiest—but that was down to rationing. But we can see that the political, social and economic landscape has deteriorated enormously since the 1940s, and obesity continues to rise and rise. How many of us adhere to the mantra of the 1940s today, in a world that never sleeps?

So, the question we have to ask ourselves is: is the Healthy Weight: Healthy Wales programme bold and radical enough to deal with the size of this problem, and reverse our obesogenic lifestyle? Wales is applauded by obesity experts for being prepared to use legislation to change the food environment, in contrast to the dither and delay at the other end of the M4. We have to stop the food industry from targeting children to eat the wrong things: that is completely unethical. And I also hope that we will be able to use the reregulation of the buses, which is coming up in the next 12 months, as an opportunity to also outlaw junk food advertising on public transport. I think it's very important that we use our public procurement muscle to ban junk food from our NHS health centres and hospitals, and I applaud Cardiff and the Vale health board for showing the way by removing all junk food from 13 of its hospital cafes and canteens, which it will be extending to its two community hospitals later this year. This initiative has actually increased their footfall and their profitability, and that shows that all health boards ought to be following that pathway, and I expect we will get a national hospital retail standard to promote the healthy options in all the retail outlets on NHS estates. Cardiff and the Vale have developed an audit tool to track that what they are delivering is what it says on the tin, which is pretty important given that if you're eating the wrong food, you're going to be costing the health service even more time and money.