In her article " Will your kids live as long as you ?", Dr Sadler highlights the fact that our increasingly sedentary, car dependent lifestyles come at a great cost to society.
Here as elsewhere, the prevalence of diabetes and obesity continues to rise. An illness confined of the elderly until 4 decades ago, diabetes is now sweeping through every demographic of society, affecting even the youngest. The gains made in cardiovascular health are starting to be undone.
But, the over-consumption and inactivity that drives these conditions is symptomatic of a far wider problem.
Air pollution, from our fossil fuelled cars, coal burning power stations and other polluting industries, kills thousands of us annually in every large city and causes widespread ill health.
We are depleting oil reserves at 1 million times the rate of their formation. This concentrated form of energy is the basis for our current economy and food security, yet we have no plan for its succession.
In the process, we are returning carbon, locked up for hundreds of millions of years, to our atmosphere where it will reside for centuries.
The resulting climate change has been recognised by the medical profession as the biggest health threat of the 21st century. Through direct affects such as heat, local weather extremes, to far greater problems arising from altered disease propagation and transmission, food and water security, air quality and mass movement of populations.
Overuse and misuse of antibiotics is rendering once life saving drugs impotent against the ravages of infectious diseases.
Our short sighted and excessive actions really are compromising the health and well being of our children.
But we don’t have to be bad ancestors. We can design healthy cities and healthy lifestyles and live within our ecological means, and in the process we can protect the future health of our children.
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