Dr. Norah Campbell:

A Chathaoirligh, I know you do not have an easy job trying to keep everyone to the time but I really want to say this because I feel it is the most important contribution I could give today and is directed at the question under discussion. Most people believe deep down that you are free to choose your own weight. People think that if you have enough willpower, you will be able to keep from overeating and maintain a balanced body weight. In fact, studies have shown that such a conception of consumption is very dominant among policymakers and politicians - no offence - even though it is not the case. Leanness or being naturally quite lean is very likely hereditary. Your regulation of how hungry you feel or whether you feel full takes place in a subcortical region of the brain that is unconscious. You therefore do not make conscious decisions like "I feel full now". If you are in an environment with constant prompts to eat, you will keep eating such that you will trip a switch in your brain and that appetite regulation system will break down. That is the emergence of a disease called obesity. It is not something that will ever be fixed in any real way with health promotion messages. In fact, we now know that about two in every ten people will be positively affected by health promotion messages. Everybody else is susceptible to the obesogenic food environment. What I am saying to Deputy Mythen is that if we want to prevent the six out of ten of the rest of our children who have not tripped that switch from doing so, we need to change the environment. Otherwise, we will have tripped the switch big-time and we will have a runaway change in the entire shift of the childhood population.