Dr. Clíodhna Foley-Nolan:

I congratulate the Chairman, who looks healthy. The gaming issue is related to marketing, which is being extended. The very innocent adverts from Cadbury 30 years ago have changed and companies now use ICT and television in participative things like gaming. We have done research on the area. The project was called Candy-coated Marketing and examined the level of exposure of preschool children to unhealthy products. Needless to say, there is very little advertising for apples or grapes. Keeping children sedentary, decreasing their activity levels and what they are exposed to in gaming are all relevant in terms of childhood obesity.

The Government's plan is at an advanced stage and I am a member of an obesity strategy group. Consultation will take place in the next few weeks. Vending machines and what is happening in schools is very much to the fore and is being actively debated. I am afraid that the idea of a financial incentive has not been on the agenda. I appreciate the logic. Plateauing can been seen in a negative way. During my career I have been involved in tobacco and HIV, and now the obesity issue. If one wanted to get depressed, it would be easy to do so.

The temporal trends are very nice. There are slideshows of the different states in the United States that show the level of obesity growing over the past ten years. To stop that is a start. Although it seems somewhat negative, one has to have a level of optimism as well as realism. The temporal trends are an increasing graph upwards. The first thing we have to do is halt the increase and get the green shoots.