Boris must control his urge to meddle with our diet
Before coronavirus, Boris Johnson did not seem the type who was much concerned with health – his own or anyone else’s. He is rumoured to have seen poor health as its owner’s fault, a matter of willpower and stiff upper lips.
When it came to weight and food, he seemed even less bothered. In 2006, defending the mothers who protested new healthy school dinners by sneaking pork pies into their kids’ bags, he said: “Let people eat what they like.” Just last year he vowed to review “sin stealth taxes” such as those on sugary food and drink. “If we want people to lose weight and live healthier lifestyles, we should encourage people to walk, cycle and generally do more exercise,” he said then.
Fast forward to last week, and him telling us we must all lose weight and fast. Not by exercise, but by state curbs on calories and sugar. The new laws include a 9pm watershed for junk food advertising, a ban on two-forone deals on sugary products, the requirement that “large restaurants, cafés and takeaways with more than 250 employees add calorie labels to the food they sell”, alcohol calorie labels and “front of pack” nutritional labelling. Oh, and rewarding GPs for pushing people towards weight management.
This almost definitely pointless set of measures has all come about because Boris
– aged 56, 5ft 10in and clearly one for the cakes and ale – suddenly realised that being fat is bad for one’s health. After nearly losing his battle with coronavirus in April, partly because of his excess tonnage, the Prime Minister has said that he had learnt a valuable lesson: “Don’t be a fatty in your 50s.”
Being fat is clearly linked with bad outcomes with coronavirus. A host of studies have reinforced the link between those admitted to hospital with or killed by Covid-19 and obesity.
It’s also true that Britain is a podgy country, with one in four adults estimated to be obese. This clearly played a part in our appalling death rate from Covid-19 – it was reported last week that England had the highest rate in Europe for the first half of the year – plays a large part. But Boris’s new campaign against obesity shows a concerning lack of understanding of the issues. Not only does his U-turn on sin taxes smack of superficiality of thought, it kowtows to the needs of the health service instead of the liberty of the people, and is bizarrely self-centred.
Boris was fat, ate junk, and had a terrible virus – now, and only now, we must all be faced with calorie counts on menus and hassled GPs suddenly morphing into diet mentors?
But the main objection I have to this whole hasty campaign is its utter lack of common sense. The reasons people overeat or drink and remain fat are complicated. It’s true that for men, sometimes losing weight is a matter of “huh, I never really r thought about this b before. Better cut out the daily d burgers and chips c and do some running!” r For most people, p though, food is deeply woven w into the psychology of misery, reward, pleasure p and comfort. c Most older people p were raised r to see s
sweets s as a sign that all is well; that one has deserved a treat. Healthy but horrid-tasting food was for many a terror administered by tyrannical parents. In adulthood, many continue to associate junk food with reward and comfort; when life is dreary, food is an instant hit of pleasure. Excessive consumption dulls the senses, which soothes the anxious. It’s not rational, but it is human.
Then there’s the associational fabric of food: almost all the social and cultural events in life, and most religious festivals, revolve around rich and abundant food. Cut the cakes and cream and bread, cut the memories. Losing weight is not just a matter of two-for-one deals or a calorie-counting app, but one of the deepest psychological complexity. The Government’s failure to recognise this is concerning.
Dieting is a life’s work. At the very least, any healthy and substantial weight loss takes many months.
Last week, though, the PM said he fears a second wave will be on us in a fortnight. If the nation begins fasting today, we might shed five pounds a head by then. I don’t see much chance of that happening. How the PM actually thinks that any sizeable number of overweight people will suddenly start dropping enough pounds to make a difference – simply because the state says to do so – is beyond me. We all know about the terrifying connection between the virus and mortality; long before Covid-19 we were absorbing public health campaigns about the dangers of being fat. We get it, and what’s stopping us from shedding pounds is about much more than the location of the confectionery aisle.
We should lose weight. Many people try and succeed; at least for a while. But the outcome is always fundamentally down to personal and individual motivation, not the meddling hand of a patronising state desperate to keep a faltering health service from collapsing.