The epidemic endemic

The Truth About Fat, by Anthony Warner. Oneworld, $40. Reviewed by David Aaronovitch.

That we are obsessed with the issue of bodyweight is evident in any week’s headlines (2019 began with a big story on children’s sugar consumption), and in the million casual mentions of the body shape of this or that acquaintance or celebrity.

The industry that has grown up around that obsession was the subject of Anthony Warner’s first book, The Angry Chef: Bad Science and the Truth about Healthy Eating. A professional chef with a science degree, Warner’s anger seems to have been the belief that we are pathologising a part of life that should be a source of joy and fellowship. His scientist’s anger is that we’re doing it for the wrong scientific reasons.

This book is about the science of fat and obesity. It starts from the premise that the great claims made about the scale of the problem and why it exists should be taken apart and re-examined.

Warner notes the health arguments and the aesthetic judgments about fatness have got hopelessly mixed up in people’s heads. A slim man himself, he sees what I see, which is that an almost violent and irrational aversion to fat people is permissible. For this book he spoke to some of the world’s leading scientists in nutrition, human biology and social epidemiology.

His contention is that obesity and our growing tendency towards being ‘‘overweight’’ is caused by multiple, complex factors. In his view, it doesn’t help that we exaggerate it. He shows, for example, the claims about our kids dying earlier than us are unlikely to be true.

Warner argues obesity is not an epidemic, but is endemic. It is not a new Aids, but a situation inherent in a modern civilisation composed of ordinary human beings living in a new world of calorie abundance.