Supersize culture will make Irish EU’s fattest

THERE is one thing that our summer heatwave has shown us and it is not a pleasing sight. Put simply, being fat has become the norm here. If you look at old photographs, the vast majority of people are slim. Look back at your own family photo album and note how many family members were obese. Very few.

So what has happened? Why have we turned into a nation waddling our way towards chronic ill health.

A study in the medical journal ‘The Lancet’ this year concludes that obesity levels rose dramatically in the United States in the late 1970s for very specific reasons.

Food production methods changed, making it possible to produce larger quantities of food more cheaply and more efficiently.

This made the product more affordable for the consumer. Inevitably, portion size grew – as did the size of the consumer.

The researchers cited other factors including accelerated marketing.

The more visible food advertising is, the more effective it is.

If you marry these factors to a willing and more affluent consumer, you reach saturation level where food is available at every turn.

Everywhere you look now, somebody is eating or drinking something and morbidly obese people are a regular sight on the streets.

Around the turn of the millennium, we Irish started to travel the same route. Like our American counterparts, we are now also driving larger cars, in part to disguise the fact that we are bigger.

The food industry is complicit as portions grow ever larger in order to shift more produce. We are complying by buying more and scoffing huge portions of food.

Microwave meals used to state the fiction “serves two” – but not any more. One per person is now the rule of thumb.

If someone invites you to their home for a meal, it would be almost considered mean today to bring along just a single bottle of wine.

If you order pasta in Italy, you will be served a portion the size of your fist. If you order it in Ireland, it will be three times that size, smothered in too much sauce and too much cheese.

Ice cream cones here are twice as big as they used to be. A scone or a muffin has doubled in size and is in truth enough for two people. A starter or appetiser in a restaurant is now a large plate.

If you order a sandwich today, it comes with chips, crisps and various other trimmings to round it up in price and size to a full meal.

Is it any wonder that the girth of the nation is growing at alarming levels?

Restaurants need to give customers more options. Piling the food high is not in our best interests. I would like to see a small plate option or a half-portion option. The food industry needs to re-evaluate what is a normal rather than a supersize portion.

Supermarkets don’t need to sell packs of doughnuts in sixes or croissants in fours. Instead, let us buy the exact quantity we need.

Plates of food in French restaurants are relatively small. And, of course, the French opt for lunch rather than dinner on the whole.

The Spanish have small plates called tapas, while dinner plates in Irish restaurants are bigger than ever.

I was in a restaurant here recently and listened as the man at the next table was informed of the spud choices by the server.

On hearing the options of “mashed, roast or boiled”, he simply replied: “Yes.”

While we have a sugar tax on fizzy drinks, this does not take into account the rosé, the prosecco and the beer which are laden with calories and sugars.

It doesn’t suit the narrative in certain quarters to blame alcohol. However, it is the elephant in the room. Pun intended.

It suits the food industry to feed us the message that our sedentary lifestyle is to blame for growing obesity levels rather than our diet.

However, a very significant editorial in the ‘British Journal of Sports Medicine’ challenges this.

It says the evidence that diet matters more than exercise in terms of health and weight loss is now overwhelming and must be heeded.

The issue here is health rather than aesthetics. And it is a misnomer to imagine that it is only poor people who are loading on the avoirdupois.

Greed and overindulgence are equally prevalent across all socio-economic groupings. Only Irish people order a cappuccino after a slap-up restaurant meal.

More than 250,000 people here now have diabetes, of which 85pc is Type 2. This is largely attributable to lifestyle and diet.

The figures for pre-diabetes are unknown. It is costing our health service €580m, or 6.4pc of the annual health spend, per year.

Exercise delivers health benefits but not weight loss, without an adjustment in diet. You cannot outrun or out-cycle a bad diet.

The World Health Organisation stated three years ago that we Irish are well on our way to becoming Europe’s most obese nation.

There is no good reason why we should fulfil that expectation.

The very last thing we need is to morph seamlessly from being the drunken Irish to being the fat Irish.

Time to put down the knife and fork and cork the wine.

The last thing we need is to morph from being the drunken Irish to being the fat Irish