Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I have number of questions. Recently the committee travelled to the North and met some people in Ulster University who spoke about North-South co-operation on the area of obesity. The clinician who came to the meeting spoke about the things that trigger obesity. It is not just food. Why is one person hungry after a meal while another is not? They are looking at trying to identify the gene. A lot of research is being done. This is where co-operation is happening. There is very positive work on this. It is about what we eat, and we are what we eat, but there are other multiple factors. As part of the debate we need to look at this. In many cases people blame the child or blame the mother but there can be other reasons a child puts on weight and why one child can eat anything and not put on weight while another child puts on weight. We need to look at it through this prism.