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Obesity has risen by almost 400% in 25 years
according to a report from the Commons health
select committee. The national growth in
waistlines could, we're told, have the following
consequences1:
• "Children
will die before their parents"
• "Amputees will become familiar in
Britain's streets"
• "There will be a huge demand for
kidney dialysis"
• "There will be many more blind people"
The media lapped this up, of course – it's
instant headline material. In fact, there's
been an alarming rise in gratuitous health-scare
headlines over the past twelve months. For example:
• "Scottish
farmed salmon is full of cancer toxins"2
• "What's in your dinner? PCBs,
dioxins, pesticides"3
• "Bird flu could be worse than
Sars"4
• "Coffee drinking linked to higher
miscarriage risk"5
• "Official: Atkins diet can be
deadly"6
Moral Panic
It's the same old scaremongering. The obesity
scare fits the definition of "moral panic"
given by sociologist Stanley Cohen in 1972:
"A condition ... emerges to become defined
as a threat to societal values and interests;
its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical
fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades
are manned by editors, bishops, politicians
and other right-thinking people; socially accredited
experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions".
You'd assume there's good scientific evidence
that weight loss is medically beneficial. But
according to Paul Campos (author of The Obesity
Myth), there's no such evidence. It's true
that severe obesity has been correlated with
ill health, but it doesn't automatically follow
that losing weight is good for everyone defined
as "overweight". Steven Milloy, of
JunkScience.com, claims that "reported
correlations between overweight/obesity and
premature death don't inspire even minimal confidence
until the obesity in question is extreme".
Government-approved body weight
Your BMI (Body Mass Index, calculated
from height and weight) shows if you're "overweight".
BMI categories have recently changed, resulting
in millions of people becoming "overweight"
or "obese" overnight (without
gaining any weight). Here are some well-known
fatties, according to current BMI categories7:
• Brad Pitt ("overweight")
• Mel Gibson ("overweight")
• George Bush ("overweight")
• Russell Crowe ("obese")
• George Clooney ("obese")
• Tom Cruise ("obese")
Junk Science
In 1996, a US study on body weight (by the
National Centre for Health Statistics)
analysed data from 600,000 subjects. The mortality
rate for white non-smokers in the supposedly
ideal BMI range (ie thin) was the same as for
those in the overweight range. Dozens of medical
studies have found increasing body weight to
be associated with a lower incidence of various
cancers. Heavier women have much lower rates
of osteoporosis (in Britain, more women die
from osteoporosis-related hip fracture than
from breast, cervical and uterine cancer combined).8
We're already eating less
The food intake of the average Briton has actually
decreased by 750 calories a day over the past
30 years, according to a study by the Royal
College of General Practitioners. (The current
official recommendation for calorie intake is
2,000 a day for women and 2,500 for men). The
reason we're getting fatter is supposedly because
we are burning off 800 fewer calories a day
than we were in the 1970s. "Children
today don't walk anywhere. They go by car",
says a Daily Mail editorial, echoing
widespread media disapproval of sedentary lifestyles.
The Daily Mail, of course, is well-known
for playing down the risks (such as crime) of
walking on Britain's streets.9
The War on Fat
The obesity scare, like the WMD scare, seems
to be an American import. Paul Campos says:
"The war on fat is both a cause and
a consequence of the transformation of the Protestant
work ethic into the American diet ethic... what
the American elites consider most desirable
is a body whose appearance signals a triumph
of the will over desire itself." Both
the US and UK establishments no doubt view obesity
as an ideal health scare for these reasons:
• It confirms the views
of puritan control-freaks
• It keeps politically-awkward stories
off the news
• It creates a lucrative pharmaceutical
market
• It correlates with poverty ("poor
= ignorant/lazy")
• It's not blamed on the establishment
Fat worse than death
An Esquire magazine poll of 1,000 women
between the ages of 18 and 25 showed that 54%
would rather be run over by a truck than be
fat. The diet industry is worth billions. There's
enormous social pressure to be thin – without
health scares. The medical warnings just add
new anxieties to existing anxieties.10
Food Anxiety
If each mouthful of food makes you anxious
(calories kill, after all), consider the following:
A pound of body fat contains 3,500 calories.
A large bar (100g) of chocolate contains about
500 calories. So if you stuff your face with
chocolate (in addition to what you normally
eat) every day for a whole week, you'll gain,
at most, one pound in weight.
Five portions a day
We've been urged to eat more fruit and vegetables
because they contain antioxidants, compounds
that ward off oxidation and prevent heart disease.
Chocolate comes from fruit (the cocoa bean is
the fruit of the cacao tree) and is a good source
of antioxidants – make sure you get five daily
portions.
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