Children cannot be seen as ‘victims’ of obesity

Operations for tubby youngsters? Where’s the free will in that? Let them try diet and exercise first

Bad lifestyles are a choice, just as good ones are. We celebrate those who take the steps necessary to live better as a triumph of the human spirit: “You lost three pounds? Well done you!” And yet anyone who lives unhealthily is cast as a casualty of things beyond their control. Poverty, parents or genetics influence the decisions we take, sure, but we still have free will. I bet that apple in the Garden of Eden looked jolly tempting, but no one forced Eve to take a bite out of it. Of course, were Eve a teenager in 2018, she’d have eaten the entire tree.

Commenting on our childhood obesity “epidemic”, Prof Russell Viner, the new head of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, says the issue isn’t declining willpower but the irresistible forces of marketing, poor mental health and abundance. He calls for a ban on junk food advertising before the watershed, inspections to see schools are promoting health and, most controversially, a massive expansion of weight-loss surgery for fat adolescents. “We used to have famine,” he says. “Famine … we’ve largely conquered and now we have the opposite problem – that of feast.”

We hear this a lot: willpower is finite and society has hit such a saturation of wealth and information that we can no longer be expected to think for ourselves. Porn. Junk food. Fake news. The only way to resist temptation is for the state to impose limits on our choices, to turn the 21st century “feast” into a gluten-free buffet.

Human beings have always rationalised irrational acts. Saint Augustine argued that while one could be expected to retain self-control while drinking wine or eating, sexual desire could override free will itself – a theme echoed in Freud’s idea that we are prisoners of experience or indoctrination, much of it subliminally filthy. But it was the Marxist belief that people are products of history and class – even if they don’t realise it – that wedded individual helplessness to the rise of a rule-setting welfare state.

The therapeutic state defines what’s healthy, your ability to do the right thing and the solutions for failure. “Here is your ideal weight. You can’t reach it by yourself. Can we book you in for surgery next week?” Why anyone should instinctively trust the state to make such important decisions, given its history of error, I don’t know. It was the state that sold off the school playing fields in the first place, and banned competitive sports because it made kids feel like losers.

If we are so concerned about the modern bacchanal, I’m surprised at the list of things we haven’t done to stop it, such as outlaw the absurd sugar content in foods or censor the internet. But that would require a fight with big business that politicians are too scared to have. Perhaps that’s good. Perhaps we don’t want to live in a Soviet-style society where we have to get up at 5am to do press-ups in Victory Square. Instead our state carries out targeted interventions such as banning adverts of “beach body ready” women – which is treating adults like children – or using surgery to slim down teens – which is treating children like adults.

Shouldn’t they wait until they are old enough to make a proper choice? Shouldn’t they be told to give exercise and vegetables another go? And who will pay for these operations? The NHS is for sick people and it’s overstretched as it is. We all know that it rations cancer drugs, so why dish out treatment to boys and girls who possibly have it within their power to heal themselves?

Tim, I hear parents shouting, you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. You don’t have kids. It’s hard to feed them well, and you’ll have to prise their ipads from their cold, dead hands. Also, I’m not one to cast the first stone. In my mid-twenties I, too, ran to fat: not quite a man mountain, but certainly a human hillock. Shedding pounds is a struggle, and any solutions by Prof Viner that help us to help ourselves are welcome.

The problem is that too often now we start our answers to social questions with the assumption that people are passive victims. It’s summarised in the overused, inaccurate word “epidemic”. An epidemic means an infectious disease: a natural phenomenon. You cannot have an epidemic of obesity, any more than you can have an epidemic of sexual harassment, because these are choices. Harvey Weinstein was no more compelled to expose himself to young actresses than I am to buy a KFC. Reject free will and you deny individual responsibility, even liability. Why prosecute Harvey for something he might claim he can’t control?

You also deny dignity, which in the West is inseparable from individual autonomy. It’s no coincidence that our genesis story is about free will. God kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden for making the wrong decision, which hurt, but the liberty to choose is one of the things that defines us as full human beings in the Judeochristian tradition, and maintaining that freedom is essential to a rather benign way of life. Freedom requires self-discipline. If we are to avoid becoming prisoners of addiction or wards of the state, we’ve got to get our minds and bodies in better order.