Keep-fit boom fails to stem obesity

While gyms and private health clubs have grown in popularity in recent years, the nation's weight has grown too.

The reason for the paradox, they said, is that such clubs tend to attract wealthier people, leaving the less well-off struggling to find ways to combat weight problems.

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Gyms, fitness magazines and manuals often focus on keeping in shape for image reasons rather than for health reasons, claimed the University of Leicester study.

The industry has been able to make a profit by attracting richer members using "seductive marketing" without providing a "sustainable approach to fitness", it concluded.

The findings, compiled by Dr Jennifer Smith Maguire of the university's department of media and communications, focused on the U.S., which has more than 20,000 commercial health clubs.

But the rapid growth in private clubs in the UK means the research can be applied here, she said.

"Over recent decades, many Western countries have experienced a strange paradox, with fitness and exercise industries expanding alongside problems of inactivity and obesity," said Dr Smith Maguire.

"The commercial fitness industry benefits from the scientific legitimacy and political urgency bestowed on population health issues, such as inactivity and obesity.

"But it is ill-equipped to address those issues for a number of reasons."

She added: "In the U.S., for example, half of commercial health club members are in the top 20 per cent of income earners.

"At the top end of the market, high income earners can afford excellent services and an enlightened approach to fitness, but at the bottom end of the market, middle and lower income earners can afford fewer and lower quality services and a factory approach to fitness.

"And at the very bottom, excluded altogether from the market, are those individuals most likely to be inactive and obese."

Dr Smith Maguire said: "The fitness industry perpetuates the idea that health is an individual matter."

But she argued that inactivity and obesity are problems for society as a whole and they require collective solutions.

"Physical exercise can be reintroduced as an integral part of everyday life, rather than yet another activity to be squeezed into an already shrinking supply of free time."

A Government report warned last month that one in two women and 60 per cent of men will be obese by 2050. Obesity is projected to cost the country £45billion a year by 2050.

By then, only 10 per cent of men and 15 per cent of women will be the right weight for their height.