Ross Clark

to blame someone, blame the Government, not us.

We all know that there are a lot of people in Britain who need to eat less, get more exercise or both. You only have to look at old photographs to see how the population has ballooned over the years.

But trying to set a maximum serving for a chocolate bar at 150 calories, as Public Health England is trying to do, is a nonsense.

There is a huge variation in calorie needs that cannot be addressed by setting one officially sanctioned portion size. What is a sensible food intake for a six stone elderly lady who has been sitting watching the television all day is going to leave a 12 stone growing schoolboy rugby player wilting with hunger.

What a lumberjack could eat every day without putting on weight would turn a sedentary worker into a tub of lard.

In any case, people who have no self-control over what they eat will just consume two bars instead of one, or maybe eight instead of four. Giving them less food for their money won’t solve their eating problem, it will merely give them an overdraft to match their overhanging belly.

The attempt to shrink food portions is yet one more way in which our leaders are failing to understand the needs of people on modest incomes, especially manual workers.

Food policy tends to be made by relatively well-off people who sit behind desks in Whitehall every day. It doesn’t take into account the fact that for people engaged in physical work and on a low income, food can swallow a significant part of their budget.

The only way to tackle obesity is to educate people how to take responsibility over what they eat. Doctors need to take obese patients aside and tell them straight that they are overweight and inform them of the consequences for their health if they fail to address the problem.

Trouble is, in our politically correct age we are not supposed to comment on people’s obesity. Any doctor who calls a patient fat will be explaining themselves in front of the General Medical Council faster than the patient could stuff a deep-fried Mars bar down his gullet.

Even the medicalised word “obese” has come under fire: a few years ago Liverpool City Council discussed banning it in order to avoid “stigmatising” overweight children.

LAST year a judgeturned-academic proposed a new law making it illegal to discriminate against people in the workplace on the basis of their weight.

Far from discouraging excessive eating, it isn’t hard to see how it would encourage it: put on weight and your boss would have to think twice before sacking you.

Instead of addressing the problem of obesity directly, the Government tries instead to tackle it through pathetic little gestures such as shrinking chocolate bars.

You can guess what will come next: we’ll have chocolate biscuits having to be sold in plain packaging and a ban on Milk Tray being presented as a way of winning the affections of a woman. Meanwhile the Food and Drink Industry will be wallowing in the extra profits it has made by charging more f or less.

This ill-thought-out initiative certainly won’t be trimming the waistlines of corporate fat cats.

‘Fat cats can now give us less for our money’