Our waistlines are no business of the Government
PUBLIC health campaigners are experts at spreading misery and creating false panics. Their favourite activity at the moment is to pretend that our country is in the grip of a so-called “obesity epidemic”, which supposedly threatens the fabric not just of our trousers but of society itself. More than 66 per cent of the population is said to be obese or overweight. This national emergency, we are told in alarmist martial tones, can be tackled only by a “war” on calories and the “weapons” of ever more intrusive state intervention.
As a result of the manufactured climate of anxiety, the health lobby’s armoury of action is expanding remorselessly. Already we have bans on “junk food” advertising aimed at children as well as the introduction of the sugar levy, due to take effect next month.
Now the quango Public Health England, the citadel of the new puritans, has issued guidelines that ask companies to slash by a fifth the calorific content of a vast range of products, from pies to sausages. Public Health England is urging adults to get into the habit of counting calories at every meal, based on maximum limits of 400 for breakfast, 600 for lunch and 600 for dinner.
Predictably the Government, instead of protecting freedom of choice, has joined in this festival of nutritional disapproval. Yesterday it was reported that Theresa May’s officials are working on a further crackdown against the marketing of junk food, including curbs on two-for-one deal promotions.
AS THESE measures demonstrate, the instinct of the state bureaucracy is to hector and punish. Health lobbyists and their allies are using obesity as a vehicle to grab more power and influence while they dress up their arrogance in the language of compassion. The great author CS Lewis wrote that, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than omnipotent moral busybodies.”
The term “busybodies” is a perfect description for public health meddlers. Like the worst religious zealots they are determined to trap the population in a permanent sense of guilt and doom. It might be asked: who does more for the sum of human happiness – the cake-dodging killjoy or the laughter-inducing Hollywood actress Melissa McCarthy, whose generous figure has been a symbol of her life-enhancing comic talent?
With their Cromwellian mentality the public health bullies show no recognition of the pleasures brought by food and drink. A central part of their propaganda is that a brainwashed public are the victims of nasty, capitalist businesses who peddle high-calorie foods in their cynical drive to boost profits. In this morality tale, Big Food is portrayed, like Big Tobacco, as the irresponsible enemy of the people.
But such a narrative is based on myths. Contrary to the claims of the new puritans, the eating of sugar, salt, fat and calories has actually been falling for decades. Sugar consumption has declined by 16 per cent per head since 1992, while there has been a 45 per cent drop in sugary drink consumption since 2003. The British Heart Foundation, no ally of excess, admits: “The overall intake of calories and saturated fat has decreased since the 1970s.”
The reason for bulging waistlines, in Britain and across the world, is simple. It is due to our increasingly sedentary lives and greater affluence. But that should be a cause for celebration, not anguish, for our societies are no longer scarred by poverty, slum housing, backbreaking manual labour and malnutrition. We are fortunate to live in an age of abundance, from entertainment technology to eating out.
Expanding girths are the consequence of that greater ease. But we should be able to take responsibility for our own lifestyles rather than be ruled by state diktat. The circumference of our waistlines is not the business of the Government. Ah, cry the finger-wagging interventionists, but what about the costs to the NHS? According to some estimates, the NHS spends £6billion a year on obesity-related treatment, while Simon Stevens, the chief executive of NHS England, has put the figure as high as £16billion.
But the fatal flaw in this argument is that it ignores the huge financial contribution made by heavyweight consumers to British prosperity. Just as smokers and drinkers pay far more in tax revenue than they take from the NHS, so Britain’s guzzlers fuel the economy.
BRITONS annually spend £203billion on food and drink, with expenditure on takeaways alone amounting to almost £10billion in 2014. Food and drink is Britain’s largest single industry, employing four million people. As part of this inspirational success story there are about 450,000 restaurants and catering establishments in Britain. Yet the merchants of misery see the enriching commercial expansion only as an excuse for bullying.
There is a profound totalitarian impulse behind the public health lobby. It is as if they think that we have a duty to the state to be healthy and maintain a spartan diet. It is an oppressive attitude brilliantly satirised by George Orwell in his novel 1984 when the ruling regime required every citizen to undertake a morning ritual of “physical jerks”.
Today we should not cave in to the real-life scaremongers, with all their self-interested regulations and edicts.
‘What of the pleasures of food and drink?’