Fatness freaks

Wednesday October 26, 2011

The government has its priorities wrong, says Simon Hills. If it really wanted to save money, it should encourage us to eat, drink and smoke more, not less. Or else mind its own business

How fat are you? Are you a big fat snorter, one chubby mit wrapped around your mouse as you read this with the other holding a Chelsea bun? A revolting lard-bucket, haemorrhaging resources from our precious NHS? Are you?

Well the government wants a word. It’s not having it, do you hear?

The week before last the Health Secretary Andrew Lansley urged people to be ‘honest’ about their eating habits and cut out the calories. In a ridiculous bit of government propagandeering he said the nation needs to cuts its daily diet by five billion calories – the equivalent of seventeen million cheese burgers, we’re told, or 128 million latte coffees (this just in case we might dare to think that lardiness is just a burger-eating working class malaise).

“Most of us are eating or drinking more than we need to and are not active enough,” England’s shrill Chief Medical Officer, Professor Sally Davies chimed in. “Being overweight or obese is a direct consequence of eating more calories than we need.” Who would have thought it, Professor?

Not surprisingly, the reaction to the pronouncements of Lansley and Davies have been somewhat withering, but about the patronising tone, rather than the substance. It is still generally agreed that we should doing something about the ‘ticking health time-bomb’ that is going to bring the nation to ruin.

Why? What the hell has it got to do with the government how much we weigh? Ticking time-bombs or no, it’s my skin and bones, and I choose how many burgers to stuff into it. I’m sorry, but it’s not the government’s job to nationalise our bodies.

The main argument – as it is with smoking and drinking – is that it costs the NHS a small fortune to treat the nation’s lard buckets. Gastric banding, for example, rose by seventy per cent from just over 4,200 cases in 2008 to just over 7,200 in 2009. Meanwhile, the number of people admitted to hospital for obesity-related conditions rose by a third last year.

Well, big deal. These figures are chicken fry. Even if the chickens are from Colonel Sanders. If the government wants to save money, it should be embracing the overweight (assuming it can get its arms around them) and instead getting to grips with the nation’s health fanatics. They drain the government of its resources by crashing their bicycles; having endless knee operations from running hundreds of miles a year; ripping their cartilages and tearing their ligaments playing football; getting lost in the Cairngorms and having to be helicoptered out. They don’t even have the good grace to pay back some of the cash by buying tobacco and alcohol to replenish the Treasury’s coffers. And at the end of it all they spend years staying alive and commanding a state pension before dying of a disease that costs the same amount to treat as everyone else’s anyway.

Lansley, in other words, should be saying ‘eat for Britain’. Far from telling people to eat less, we should be encouraging them to get down to the burger bar. While the stick-thin get themselves stuck up Snowdon, suffer groin injuries on the Great North Run and collapse on their cardio work-outs, surely the government should be issuing posters of porkers stuffing pizza into their chubby jowls, guzzling down lager and finishing it all off with a fag at the end of it. They could even import slogans from America such as: ‘Smart ways to RIGHT-SIZE your portions.’

Fish and chip vans should be compulsory in every town centre, and there must be, by law, a Pizza Hut in every town with a population of, say, 20,000. In the same way that politicians are demanding that alcohol should not be sold as a loss leader, so they will have to desist from offering free salads as they are doing at the moment (not losing a huge amount on that, one suspects). There could be a smokers’ helpline offering advice on how to get through twenty a day, and how to manage your budget to afford it.

The only problem is, of course, is that despite our increasing girth, we might live longer than the government thinks. My own theory is that key to a long life is to smoke cigars by the score: George Burns, Jimmy Savile, Fidel Castro. Even better to be fat and belligerent, too: Churchill, Lew Grade, Hitchcock.

And if that’s the case, so much the better. It means the government can have its (lardy) cake and eat it. And spend its time governing rather than bossing about the sizeable, in every sense of the word, portion of the population that exercises its right to eat what it wants.

Simon Hills is associate editor of The Times Magazine and author of Strictly No! How We’re Being Overrun by the Nanny State