Mary Mitchell O'Connor (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the experts. The leaders look great. I love the seven-point plan and I am trying to mull over it. Can the medical witnesses comment on birth weight? People say that it is genetic and that they cannot lose weight. With regard to the psychologists, I come from a teaching background and always found it very difficult to talk about weight in a classroom because of the possibility of pinpointing and embarrassing one or two overweight children. The teacher worries about bullying and psychological effects on the child. I am also interested in the points made about mood and depression. Are helpful figures available on that?

Reference was made to stepping up. What did children do to go from 2,000 steps to 15,000 and 30,000 steps? Can we get the message out to parents? As someone who has done every diet in the book, even though I thought I knew everything about food I had to get someone to help me to lose a stone and a half. One reads all the diet material and the calorie count but one forgets to balance foods and to eat protein and carbohydrate. We have very poor knowledge of food and cooking. I am not great at the latter. How do we get the message out to people? I have read that teenage girls drop off at 16 or 17 years of age and do not get involved in exercise from that point on.