Question: There has been a great deal in the press recently about rising rates of obesity in young people. What should be done about this?

Tom Wylie: There is no single answer. The nature of food presentation - packaging, marketing and most importantly basic food and nutrition education - should be more appropriate for young people.

Schools and youth projects ought to offer healthier meals, and information about healthy eating should be directly targeted at the young using a variety of media.

Different forms of education are needed to enable young people to see the impact of having different kinds of food, and to them to prepare meals for themselves which are better and healthier.

Question: Should fast food vending machines be taken out of schools?

Tom Wylie: Yes absolutely, and we need to extend this - it should not be limited to schools.

Youth clubs and leisure centres for example should also take out their vending machines if these are not selling nutritional commodities.

We need to give young people alternatives to commercial fast food.

Question: Do you think this comes down to language? Is politicians using their bully pulpit the best way to communicate the message?

Tom Wylie: I think this applies to all kinds of health issues. Government health warnings, as delivered by politicians, can only go so far - as we've seen now of 20 years of health warnings on cigarette packets. I don't think many people pay much attention to them but they are an important confirmation of official medical advice.

Similar considerations apply to other health issues. It may be better if the chief medical officers, for example, rather than politicians were seen as the authorities.

What is needed is much more influential peer education and people who are closer to their lives than official spokesmen.

I'm thinking of sports people of various kinds, celebrities, and indeed their own mates.

Question: Should there be more competitive team sports in schools, in order to combat obesity?

Tom Wylie: I play sport myself so I see the point of team games, but there are limits to what these achieve: young people need access to a greater variety of physical activities not simply team games. And they need them beyond school, not just within it

There is sometimes an unnecessary polarisation about the place of team sports in young people's lives because some politicians are nostalgic about their own youth when perhaps they played rugby for their House in their public school 30 or 40 years ago.

Question: The re-classification of cannabis is imminent. What are your thoughts on that?

Tom Wylie:The re-classification was the considered view, developed over time, of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.

The use of that drug as with tobacco and alcohol is harmful but it is not as harmful as some others. To have it higher up the ratings scale, simply to make some kind of political point, is wrong.

Obviously though this re-classification has to be accompanied with the message that it remains harmful.

Question: So, like the obesity warnings, Britain's youth should be told about the dangers by people other than politicians?

Tom Wylie:Young people by and large have no sense of their own mortality: they think they will survive forever.

They don't really grasp death or indeed health damage in any way. This is associated with all sorts of behaviour linked to the need to create your own identity during adolescence.

So they take risks with smoking and alcohol and other harmful drugs. For some, this risk is severe because they do too much of it or they do it in settings which are themselves risky - they get off their heads near canal banks for example.

Or they have got psychological or medical predispositions which mean that their consumption of alcohol or more harmful drugs is more damaging.

Question: So what do you think should be done to make them understand?

Tom Wylie:Well I think heavy messages which suggest that one ecstasy tablet will kill you are not helpful. They look at their mates and they see that it isn't true.

Now this is not to say that it doesn't kill some individuals, but a blanket message doesn't connect with their limited experience.

One has got to keep on making these subtle points to young people and indeed offer them other ways of creating excitement or solace.Why are they taking some of this stuff? Because they don't have available to them alternative forms of excitement or alternative ways of chilling out.

For some young people the use of drugs is to enhance the excitement, or for some it is a way of escaping from the harsh realities that they are facing.

Government needs a highly calibrated response which includes law enforcement, medical warnings, drug education and effective youth work.