the how is it, portion control? the obesity crisis is being fuelled by the average person eating 50% more calories than they realise. they put this down to two things, won his portion control and second is people eating more meals outside their home. a good old statistic. what's happened is that the office for national statistics asked people to estimate how many calories they were eating over a certain number of days. many estimated they were eating 2000, in fact there were eating 2000, in fact there were eating well over 3000. —— men estimated they were eating 2000. basically the story is that men are kidding themselves. you kid yourselves. men are worse than women on this. we kid ourselves we are eating far less than actually are. you have a sugar tax coming in, long—awaited, in april. which the government estimates will get the treasury 520 million which will then be invested in primary schools and

sport. that has been trialled for a longtime, it's been off and on. add to see if that changes behaviour. it's on in ireland, ireland has introduced one. mexico has a sugar tax, it has seen sales of soft drinks full. the scottish government has the same kind of thing, talking about forcing restaurants and clubs to control their portion size. smaller portions. smaller plates, they reckon. not like in america where you can get a second portion, fourth portion, full three. we all know what we have to do, it's that cultural, habitual thing of doing it day in day out. that's it for the papers this hour. we will be back at 11:30pm. next on bbc news — meet the author. if you've read any of the four

mick herron novels featuring jackson lamb, you'll know what to expect. skulduggery, lowlife and the threat of terror. a political class self—centred, often incompetent, sometimes corrupt. time is pressing, the threat is real, and jackson land's ramshackle outfits, never playing by the rules, has to try and save the day. welcome. jackson lamb and his merry men and women are a pretty rough lot, aren't they? sort of, they are ordinary people in many ways. i'm keen on these spies

having ordinary lives in contemporary london. they don't lead gilded lives, they aren't pampered, they are under enormous pressure, there is a terrorist threat in this book. we'll go into that in some detail, but not too much in order not to spoil it. but they are rough in the way they deal with each other? what strikes me is that, very seldom, are they really nice to each other? very seldom, yes. but there are certain bonds that develop. not as a group, very much, but there are pairings throughout the series. and i like to think in the group scenes, i always have at least one scene where everyone is there always once. 0n those occasions, we do reach some kind of harmony, usually when working on a problem.

it may be harmonious in that sense, and they do care about each other and help each other, but you never get them saying, what are you really like? they seem to be driven by a desire not to show too much of themselves. do you think that is a characteristic of people who find themselves in that world? i think it might be a characteristic of people who work in offices. i focus on the ordinariness of these people. they are spies, but to an extent, they could be anything, really. the relationships are determined by the fact that they're all frustrated by their ambitions in their careers and all have to work together and don't want to. and if we met any of them in the streets, we would have no idea what it isthey do by the way they behaved, which is the point. indeed, i was looking around the tube this morning looking for characters. i won't give too much away,

because it is a tense plot. there is a blackmail threats made against someone, it's made directly by someone who, to put it mildly, is high in the intelligence industry. do you think that, in that one, get happiness directly is that? do you think that, in that form, could happen as directly is that? certainly, yes. a real threat, we have this photograph, and i think we can say this involves someone who's involved in cross dressing, and therefore is going to produce an embarrassing series of stories in the papers, the question is, will he brazen it out and say, this is me, or will he fold at the threat of blackmail? part of the reason for introducing a plottine is was introduced it in introducing this unpleasant character to have some integrity and bravery, here's facing a decision to tough it out or cave.

so the decision he partly makes to tough it out indicate there's a core of integrity in the character. when writing a character in circumstances like that, do you try to put yourself in that position and ask what you would do? always, i try to write characters from the inside out. you see what lamb does and says, but you never get to know what he thinks and feels. to someone who hasn't read the four preceding books and is perhaps going to pick this one up and maybe go back, how would you describe jackson lamb? i think the best way to describe them would be to meet him, to enter this department of the secret service where failures get assigned, you have to go round the back of the building and through a door thatjams, and up the stairs until you reach the top attic. when you open the door, you find a dark room

with no natural light, a very large man with his feet on the desk, the air would be noxious, because he smokes and drinks, he's aggressively flatulent. that's how he marks his territory. do you know jackson lamb very well yet, or argue still discovering him? still discovering him, but although in the book i'm working on at the moment, there is more revealed about him ever before. he's saying things he has never said before. what will we learn about him that we don't know? a bit more about his past, i think that's the courts to the character of lamb. there is a sense in which we're always meant to ask the question, how did he end up here?

we know we don't know the whole story. that's partly because i don't know it yet either. wasn't deliberate to conceal his background, it's just that as you tease out this character, you discovered as well there was a mystery about him that you share with the reader? i think so. the character was never meant to take the central role he has come to do, but as i started writing him, i realised there was opportunity is there to write in a way i never had before, an injection of humour into the books and also that larger—than—life character who has a past which is cloaked in mystery. the other fascinating thing about this story, and it is quite unusual, is that it is set notjust in the contemporary world, a london principally where the threat of a terrorist act is ever present, but you've been very specific, there has been a referendum on brexit. there are political figures

in here who bear not a resemblance in a imitative way, but a broad resemblance to character actors we might recognise on the little spectrum, not as individuals, but people with a point of view. that is a bold thing to do? it didn't seem to me at the time that was the case. i was simply writing about the world i find myself in the back the novel had been in preparation since before the referendum, i didn't start writing until afterwards. that changed a lot of things, obviously. i hadn't foreseen the result of the referendum, i think few people did. as soon as it happens, things became clear. it became clear from some of the terrified reactions from the cabinet ministers who orchestrated this, the current as of the prime minister resigning, and the backstabbing of the following leadership election, we went through a long period of fasting chaos. period of farce and chaos.

that is the background to the book. london rules is a thriller, but the backdrop is where we have all been living. finally about this book and the others, you resist very deliberately, i think, the idea that on the last page, everything conveniently tied up. it's all over. maybe something has happened that avoids a cataclysm, but the idea that calm has been restored is not really one you're comfortable with, is its? we live in a state of ongoing tension. that can't be solved by a final chapter. so you say, be prepared to be disturbed and i think you can relax when it's over? yes. thank you very much. sunshine was more limited today, there could be

a change of fortune. more breaks in the cloud could arrive in the west of the country. milder air, and a mild night tonight. through the night, that becomes lighter and more patchy. mist and hill fog in that rain. no frost by monday morning. instead we have two weather fronts getting close, most of the rain on that first one. in between those we will get breaks in the cloud in that milder air. a change in fortunes because eastern scotland and england likely to be dull and drab

with rain and drizzle. west could see some sunshine. perhaps across northern ireland ahead of the next weather front. a mild day, ten to 13 degrees, cooler in the east where we have rain and drizzle. that will still be around overnight tomorrow, the two main areas of rain converging, cloud breaks later. turning a bit chilly, not too cold because there will be a breeze. milder underneath the cloud through tuesday and probably a chilly wind blowing. eastern england seeing some outbreaks of rain on tuesday, through the afternoon. that tends to peter out, further west into scotland and northern ireland, more likely to see sunshine at times. still decent temperatures. but colder in eastern england. things will dry up because high pressure is

building across the uk. it will keep these weather fronts at bay. we have not seen much high pressure over the past few weeks, it means after a mild start to the week it will gradually turn that bit colder. with the high building in, it should become dry in most areas.