Poverty makes you fat claim is a modern irony

I reckon you could get half a ton of green stuff on a plate for the same price as that cooked alternative of pie and chips

Don’t know about you, but I’ve long reckoned that anyone who hasn’t the gumption to make a link between packing away the pasties, pizza and puddings with piling on the pounds should never be put in charge of something like... a machine gun.

“Crickey, Sarge! I never realised that if I loaded the thing, pointed it at all those civilians and then pulled the trigger it could cause so much damage. Sorry!”

Just one of the worries that sprang to mind when reading of an obesity epidemic that appears to be sweeping through the UK’s armed forces.

As of July there were 8,662 obese members of the army, 4,666 in the Royal Navy and 4,274 in the RAF. Similar numbers were described as being simply overweight.

“It is expensive and fraudulent to retain troops who are this out of condition,” a former senior officer told the press. “They would be a danger to themselves in any sort of fighting situation and a danger to fitter troops serving alongside them.”

The answer has been diet pills, liposuction and the distribution of Fitbits. (I’m not sure what these last things are but presumably they’re some sort of app that reminds you to eat less and move more. Thank God for Silicon Valley – we would never have worked that one out on our own!)

This chubbiness in uniform is nothing new, of course. For years the majority of American soldiers have been officially fat and a leaked memo in 2009 revealed that British officers in Afghanistan were warning that any likely success in Helmand was likely to be compromised by a “worrying trend of obesity.”

The next generation of our brave boys is likely to be just as bad. Another report – this time from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health – warned that before very long almost a quarter of 11 year old boys would be obese and therefore made all the usual “something must be done” noises.

And that’s if there is another generation. They gave similar warnings that infant mortality rates were on the rise thanks to, among other things, the obesity of mothers. And all of the problems were very much due to poverty.

This must surely be something else to add to my recent fixation on modern ironies.

There was the observation that motorcyclists were once young but are now all OAPs, for example, or that owning a pushbike was a few years ago a sign of social lowliness, but now it’s a definite badge of middle-class membership.

Another amazing insight was that in Victorian times, say, the poor were skinny and the rich were fat – for pretty obvious reasons – although today it seems to be the reverse. (Perhaps those rather expensive Fitbits really do work.)

This was brought home in the story about the flabby servicemen in which an officer said: “Unfortunately, it costs troops more to eat healthily in army cook houses. Pie and chips is cheaper than salad.”

Really? I reckon you could get half a ton of green stuff on a plate for the same price as that cooked alternative of pie and chips. And there’d be no need for an oven and a deep-fat fryer either.

Surely that doesn’t apply only to the NAAFI? The last time I looked, a carrot was still much cheaper than a Mars Bar, a glass of tap water undercuts a can of Coke by a very wide margin and just at the moment there are so many spare apples about, for example, it’s impossible to give the things away.

Eating healthily – and above all, tastily and well – has never been expensive. It’s actually the cheap, economic option.So why is it that the poorer you are, statistically you are more likely to break those bathroom scales?

In the same way that you would expect in soldiers, sailors and airmen a strong desire to be fighting fit, you might expect the shameful number of folk forced to live below this nation’s poverty line to be skinny. But no. It’s the opposite. If anyone can work out the weird logic in any of this, please let me know.

If, however, being poor really does mean being fat is the only alter native, how come all those poor souls in Yemen look so unhealthy at the moment?