Now Christmas is over, many of us will be diligently ignoring the bathroom scales to avoid seeing how much all that Christmas pudding and mulled wine has added to our waistline. After all, putting on a few extra holiday pounds is a story as old as time – and it can be notoriously difficult to shed this weight in the cold, demoralizing months of January and February.

However, in recent years this need to lose a few extra holiday pounds has been superseded by a much more worrying trend: the rise of nationwide obesity.

Indeed, weight-related health issues are a growing concern, with the total number of obese Brits having effectively doubled since the 1990s. Around 3,000 NHS ward admissions a day are linked with obesity, and an estimated 31,000 people a year die from related cardiovascular diseases. This makes obesity a bigger killer than smoking in England and Scotland.

Reducing the burden of obesity will of course require a multi-layered approach, though increasing education and public awareness would be a major step. Health experts and policymakers should unite around the goal of giving the public the knowledge and skills they need to maintain a healthy diet and lifestyle. After all, valuing our health starts at home; and so it is time to go back to basics with nutrition.

One way to do this would be to update the Eatwell Guide; the UK’s official set of dietary guidelines which …