Obesity Institute: Professor Carlton Cooke

What led you to your current position at Leeds Beckett?

I’ve have been back at Leeds Beckett University for two years this June, and before that I spent nearly five years at Leeds Trinity University. Before that I spent the best part of 26 years at Leeds Beckett.

I have line management responsibility for some of the researchers that work in the field of obesity in the Carnegie School of Sport, and I also have responsibility for another research theme in another centre. There’s the Centre for Human Performance, which is a big centre within the school, and one of the themes within that is muscular skeletal and orthopaedic sports medicine – I am the theme lead for that as well.

Primarily, the reason for me coming back to Leeds Beckett was to focus around supporting work in the School with the development of research and knowledge exchange in the field of obesity related work.

It soon became apparent that Professor Peter Slee had a vision to establish an Obesity Institute.

There had been continuous development in the field of obesity in the university, but with Professor Louisa Ells coming with her established track record, and me coming back into the fold with a specific brief around supporting the further development of obesity-related work within the school of sport, then there was a step change that really was a key focus.

What do you think puts the Obesity Institute in a really innovative position?

There’s a couple elements to that. The fact that the Obesity Institute is the vision of the Vice Chancellor, and he believes we’re able to be positioned to be so very high-profile as a university in terms of our work being impactful in the real world.

Peter uses the metaphor of talking to your next door neighbour over the fence. And whilst it’s perhaps a little bit more difficult to explain the intricacies of REF or KEF or TEF, it’s much easier to talk about real world things that affect huge proportions of the population, not just of the UK but the world, in the context of our work around supporting those living with or at risk of obesity.

So he sees it in those terms. And he also sees it as a pan-university initiative, a real effort to cut away and not be obsessed about boundaries, localism and parochialism. We all work for the same institution, but in pooling our expertise and having four pillars to our work, the whole should be greater than the sum of the parts.

The four pillars are research, knowledge exchange, education and training, and patient and public involvement. So, it’s not just about research grants, PhD students and papers, super important though those are.

There’s the knowledge exchange and obesity-related research, through our partnerships with More Life and other partners outside of the university, and the applied nature of Louisa’s research.  And by combining these you get away from potential barriers and questions over whether research is more important than knowledge exchange.

Another element of the Institute that we are pushing forward with is education and training, which is of course a key focus in the university

There’s a fourth very important element, which is Public and Patient Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) so anything that we do in the Institute focuses on supporting those living with obesity or at risk of it. It’s really important to involve people who live with obesity, or are at risk of it, so their views, their perspectives, their contributions are key and are hugely valuable. Too often these are neglected.

A lot of the work of the Obesity Institute will be a continuation of the good work we’re already doing, but that is why the PPI hub is so important as a pillar. Because, in the same way that we wanted to continue to build a reputation for obesity work, not just research, our work is focussed on real people living real lives.

Is there one factor that can be addressed to better tackle obesity?

So, if you want to support somebody who’s living with obesity to make healthy lifestyle changes there’s a combination of behaviours that will need to be considered. It all comes down to behaviours. They have to eat less, and exercise more. That’s dead easy, the science of that has been established for generations, but doing something about it is hard.

But then you have to look at his within the context of whole systems issues.

You’ll have heard the term obesogenic environment – in supermarkets you can have a huge bar of chocolate for a pound, and if you buy another one at the same time you pay another 50p, or you buy two and get another one free.

All the stuff around whole systems says that you have to think about how we organise our planning. How we plan cities, the use of green spaces, security going out at night, and active transport. It’s about appropriate support and infrastructure for active transport. How much of our days do we spend sat at a desk looking at a screen, whether it’s to have a meeting or to work?

Where do we put spending time outside when we’re bringing up children as apriority? In other countries, their earliest educational experiences for kids is all outside, ours isn’t. So, we’re conditioning people to do what we’re doing now all day, and we wonder why people then struggle to be physically active and maintain healthy eating habits.

There’s not one single answer, there’s not one single thing the institute can focus on and do, and it’s important that we work very closely to understand motives of different people. Some people will enjoy physical activity, others will be more comfortable restricting their eating. So, it’s not one size fits all.