There are renewed calls for a sugar tax, with a report showing young Australian adults are nearly twice as likely to be obese as their parents and one in five kids are now overweight before they start school.
The rates of obesity in Australia are damning, says Jane Martin from the Obesity Policty Coalition. She says a tax on sweetened drinks, including soft drinks, must be part of a national action plan, because physical activity guidelines will not solve the problem.
"We are in a very privileged position in Australia, we have got a strong economy but it will be undone by this public health problem," warned Ms Martin.
"When you have 71 per cent of men overweight or obese, when you have severe obesity doubling in the last 20 years that's a serious problem and it's going to take some time to slow down, let alone turn around," she said.
Data released by the Australian Institue of Health and Welfare on Friday shows nearly two in three Australian adults were overweight or obese in 2014-15, up from 57 per cent in 1995.
Severe obesity has also increased from 19 per cent to 28 per cent over the past 20 years and people are becoming overweight or obese at younger ages.
The AIHW shows 15 per cent of people born in the mid-1990s were obese at age 18 to 21.
"This is almost double the proportion of obese 18 to 21-year-olds who were born two decades earlier," said AIHW spokeswoman Lynelle Moon.
A similar pattern was observed for very young children born in the early 2010s.
Between ages two to five, about nine per cent of the children born in that period were obese. However, of children born in the early 1990s, only four per cent were labelled obese.
After smoking, obesity in Australia is the leading burden of disease and requires an urgent policy response from the federal government, says Ms Martin.
"We don't have a national obesity strategy and we should, looking at a health levy on sugary drinks in particular," Ms Martin told AAP.
"We also need to protect children from unhealthy food marketing," she said.
Earlier this week, Minister for Health Greg Hunt released the first national physical activity guidelines for infants, which recommend children should spend at least one hour on energetic play every day.
But Ms Martin says obesity is caused by what people are eating.
"This issue really needs to be addressed through the food environment because it's driven mostly by poor diet.
"What's driving poor diets is the promotion of highly processed food, the price of these foods are very cheap and they are very available. Around 40 per cent of the energy in our diets is coming from unhealthy foods," she said.
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