Can’t keep hiding from heavy truth
WELL blow me down. The nation’s greatest minds have been considering the obesity crisis and come up with a stunning conclusion... “We need to eat less,” said Public Health England’s Duncan Selbie.
You can see why he gets paid the big bucks.
But perhaps, finally, we are nearing the dazzlingly obvious truth.
For the past decade we have danced around the whole weight issue. There has been so much confusion, misinformation and plain lies about food we’ve blundered into an obesity crisis costing more than £48billion and 30,000 lives every year.
For years we’ve been reluctant to talk straight about weight for fear of causing offence.
The message of promoting the (good) belief in young women that it’s inner beauty that matters has overwhelmed the (true) belief that being chronically overweight kills.
When schools started weighing reception kids, newspapers were littered with stories of outraged parents whose kids had been branded obese.
Parents who couldn’t see the reality with their own eyes, certainly didn’t want to hear the truth from a school nurse.
And a generation of parents became paralysed with fear at even mentioning weight to teenage girls for fear of sparking anorexia or bulimia.
Meanwhile, parental paranoia meant kids were rarely let out to play in the street as the Tories merrily sold off playing fields for drive-thrus.
Oh, and then there was technology
and the appearance of endless boredom busting gadgets; Xboxes, iPads, smartphones and giant TVs which meant we never needed to leave the sofa and Doritos again.
All that time food manufacturers and restaurant chains grew Mr Creosote grotesque on the profits of selling us over-processed foods in bigger portions laced with sugar and salt more addictive than heroin.
We now spend in excess of £30billion a year on fast food.
Adults in the UK eat 79 million ready meals and 22 million takeaways. As a national pastime we gave up queuing and took up consuming. And don’t get me wrong. I’ve loved it. With a twice yearly diet thrown in to make myself feel better and to provide a topic of conversation for January, the rest of the time I’ve filled my boots and my bargain bucket in the national gorgeathon.
Now, we all have to face facts and agree with Duncan Selbie that it has to stop.
But the reality is we can’t do it alone. If going on a diet made the country thin it would have worked
We have been reluctant to talk straight about weight
when the Green Goddess was a girl. It doesn’t. What does work is telling the food companies who have made us fat that it’s time to shape up.
Tell them to cut out the addictive additives, reduce portion sizes, use fresh ingredients. Treat us well so we can live well.
Yes we all need to have personal responsibility. But first we must have responsible food firms.