Making us slim and miserable will do a fat lot of good

BRITAIN is fat and getting fatter, and the Covid-19 outbreak has underlined the dangers of this. Those of us who are overweight are not just out of condition. We are at more risk from many diseases, sometimes quite dangerously so.

Boris Johnson learned this when he caught the virus and was no doubt warned by the doctors who saved him that he needed to lose weight.

It is a message that he has taken very much to heart, and he has grown noticeably slimmer since his illness. But how can the Government now help the nation to do the same?

In a package due to be announced tomorrow, the Prime Minister hopes to use various tools to make us more careful about what we eat – the labelling of food and drink to show how many calories they contain, the banning of certain kinds of promotion and advertising.

But some of these actions may put a squeeze on struggling small businesses, just as they battle to regain customers after the lockdown. And others may rebound, by annoying the very people that they are supposed to persuade – a problem the pre-Covid Boris Johnson was well aware of.

So we advise caution – persuasion and incentives rather than joyless bans, finger-wagging and compulsion. Accurate information on food contents can surely never be a bad thing, and the encouragement of exercise (though it is unlikely to lead to weight loss) should be a government priority.

There is no single thing which does more for individual health than regular exercise, which need not i nvolve strenuous activity or expensive gym memberships.

In the end, we have to learn to be thinner and healthier. But this will not be achieved by making us more miserable.