So we're not getting fatter...

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Ah yes! The "obesity pandemic", the curse of junk food and "obesogenic environments". And this:

"When we are talking about obesity, we are not just talking about something that everyone is equally susceptible to.

We are dividing up into two tribes. There is a group of the population that are now resistant to dramatic weight-increase and a susceptible portion who continue to gain.

The Government's approach to the issue needs to be more detailed if it is to be tackled successfully."

Since we know that levels of obesity really haven't shifted much over the last decade, perhaps we need to start seeing the problem as one specific to particular people and to target public health efforts to those people rather than introduce nannying all-population policies that simply 'punish' people who don't have a problem.

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A reminder that we aren't getting fatter...

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I've said this before but worth saying again - we aren't getting fatter:

Whilst child obesity is a major concern for parents, the rate of child obesity has not inexorably risen. According to the Health and Social Care Information Centre, amongst boys between the ages of 2 and 15, the proportion classed as obese increased from 11.1% in 1995 to 19.4% in 2004, but then ebbed to 17.1% in 2011. 12.2% of girls in the same group were obese in 1995; this rate peaked in 2005 at 18.8%, but steadily decreased to 14.8% in 2010. 

Whatever it is that we're doing already appears to be working. Perhaps we should just carry on as we are - without more bans, controls and other finger-wagging from New Puritans?

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So are we getting fatter or not?

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I suppose it couldn't go unexamined - I remain convinced that obesity is less of a problem than some would claim. And I also feel that the most up-to-date health statistics support my argument.

Let's start with this graph from "Adult anthropometric measures,overweight and obesity" published by the NHS:

As I've pointed out before there was a significant increase in levels of obesity but this appears to have come to an end (although evidence of any fall in adult obesity is limited). The commentary with this graph says:

The rate of increase in obesity prevalence has been slower in the second half of the period than the first half, and there are indications that the trend may have been flattening out in recent years. However, obesity in men and women in 2010 was at its highest level since 1993, and in men the 2010 level was also significantly higher than in the period between 2000 and 2005.

We could note also (which the commentary doesn't) that the levelling off in rates of obesity matches a methodological change - allowing for non-response. However, the essential point in all this remains that obesity levels are not rising but appear to be on a level trend. This may not be desirable in overall public health terms but it does not constitute and actual or looming crisis.

More importantly the problem does not seem - as the "let's scare everyone about sugar" brigade want us to believe - to be linked to overall diet. After all, if this were the case we would expect significant increases in levels of 'overweight'. However the same report says this:

Among men and women, the proportion who were overweight (BMI 25 to less than 30kg/m2) has changed very little between 1993 and 2010, fluctuating between 41% and 47% in men and between 31% and 34% in women.

 The point here is that the obesity problem is a matter of behaviour - people eating too much of the wrong sort of food - rather than a consequence of industrial food production methods.

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Food snobs, nannies and the attack on food choice

Fat and getting fatter. That’s the message our media proclaim today and at the front is the ever-so-slightly chubby and terribly righteous celebrity and master of ‘slam some food in a dish and call it cooking’, Jamie Oliver:

The country's bill of health is shocking, and it's not going to get any better over the next 30 years if a clearly-defined plan isn't put into place soon. We simply can't afford the financial or health costs of doing nothing.

To be fair to Jamie, when given the chance he proposes precisely nothing by way of alternative strategy which is rather a good thing. But others are at the head of the charge screaming loudly that it’s the food industry that’s at fault not us for eating too much and exercising too little:

But Professor Philip James, of the International Association for the Study of Obesity, said it was a "stupid" and "pathetic" response to the problem.

"It is not simply a question of personal responsibility. There is an environmental problem in terms of the food system we have."

He went on to say that the junk food industry "manipulated" individuals into consuming their products and that was why legislation was needed.

Sorry Professor James but you are wrong – not just because you really haven’t the first idea about how the food industry works - or advertising for that matter -  but because you deny the facility of free will to the poor.

They’re all out there explaining how it isn’t the poor consumers’ fault they’re getting fat but the fault of the “food industry” – here’s Billy:

One half of the obesity crisis is calorie dense food. Calorie dense food is food that contains high levels of fat and sugar. Fat and sugar have been commoditised by the food industry, and are now sourced from wherever is cheapest on the day. So what was already cheap is getting relatively cheaper all the time.

That’s right folks, the solution is to make food more expensive. In the heart of the deepest and most painful recession since the 1930s, people are proposing that we make food more pricey. And who would suffer from that? The poorest and most needy. It makes me so angry to see the self-righteous know-it-all left showing yet again their utter contempt for the lifestyle choices that ordinary people make. That’s right – choices, you know freedom, liberty and the right to live our own lives uninterfered with by the acolytes of the Church of Public Health.

However, dear reader, there is one last killer fact that underlines why Jamie, Billy and the Prof are wrong. Obesity rates are falling. That’s right – we aren’t getting any fatter any more.

It looks like all the warnings about kids being overweight might be paying off, as a group of experts reckons the rate of child obesity is slowing.

The National Heart Forum found evidence that far fewer of you will be badly overweight by 2020 than people previously thought.

Or maybe you’d prefer a source that isn’t CBeebies;

Despite the government ignoring the anti-obesity lobby's urgent suggestions for traffic light labelling on food and suchlike, the latest figures show that obesity amongst men has fallen to 22% and the female obesity rate has fallen to 24%.

Just as the alcohol pandemic is a myth, so is the obesity crisis. And the solution isn’t to condemn the food choices of the poor, to make food more expensive, to ban transfats, to limit advertising or any of the other clobbering nudges preferred by those who wish to denormalise some foods (the ones they disapprove of for aesthetic reasons, in the main).

The solution is precisely what the government has done. Encourage people to eat less and to exercise more.

But then the Church of Public Health doesn’t like the bleedin’ obvious, do they!

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I do rather wish Guardian columnists would stop treating the working class as imbeciles

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It is well known among the cognoscenti that the adverts we see contains special powers that make it nearly impossible for the innocent viewer – especially if that innocent viewer is from the lower socio-economic classes – to resist the blandishments of the business present products or services before them.

“The current crisis of public health is not in any case about the collapse of personal responsibility but a reflection of a toxic environment in which making healthy choices has become increasingly difficult, particularly if you are on a tight budget or work long hours.”

Scuttling from a back-breaking job cleaning toilets to collect the kids followed by a desperate search for some affordable grub to silence the rumblings in those kids tummies, these poor folk from lower socio-economic groups are society’s victims – dragged into McDonalds no doubt by a special advertising pheromone affecting only working class people on less than twenty grand a year (and detectable only by Guardian columnists).

This is all utter and complete tripe and Felicity Lawrence reveals both her prejudice and her patronising nature by suggesting that nothing in the so-called “obesity epidemic” has anything at all to do with personal choice or responsibility:

“...the fact that your risk of being obese relates closely to your socio-economic status is not a question of social justice but a problem of the feckless poor being too ignorant or spineless to make good choices.”

Now – leaving aside that the obesity epidemic, rather like the alcohol pandemic, is something of a New Puritan fiction – it still remains the fact that whether Mary-Jo is grossly overweight is a concern for Mary-Jo and for no-one else. And it remains the fact that most people who eat pizza, who pop in for a McD or who guzzle the occasional fizzy drink are not obese and present no health problem as a result of their diet.

Yet people who write in self-regarding journals such as the Guardian persist in pointing at the working classes – with their drinking, smoking and fatty foods – and saying that they are the blameless victims of mass marketing. I hate to disappoint Ms Lawrence but she – and all her righteous, lentil-knitting, whole foods munching mates – are wrong.

Those ‘lower socio-economic groups’ that the Guardian so likes to patronise smoke, drink and eat burgers because they like smoking, drinking and eating burgers. These things give them pleasure – as does having lots of sex and watching reality TV shows. If you want to change their behaviour, you have to offer them affordable alternative pleasures that are as good.

And anyway the whole argument collapses when we’re presented with the real facts:

The actual figures...show that the trend from 2002 has actually been flat. For 2009 ... the proportion of all men who were obese was 22.1 per cent, the same as in 2002.

So Ms Lawrence, just shut up and go away. Leave the working classes to the pleasures they choose and stop patronising them.

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We aren't getting fatter...

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Once again the worshippers at the Church of Public Health are misleading us - but not one single voice of challenge have I heard on the BBC of in the newspapers to this:

Governments around the world need to make immediate and dramatic policy changes to reverse a pandemic of obesity which could affect an extra 11 million people in the UK over the next 20 years, public health scientists have warned.

This simply isn't true - as VGID points out from the latest figures :

Despite the government ignoring the anti-obesity lobby's urgent suggestions for traffic light labelling on food and suchlike, the latest figures show that obesity amongst men has fallen to 22% and the female obesity rate has fallen to 24%.

Given that the previous prediction could not have been more wrong—despite the modest task of forecasting just 4 years ahead—how likely do you think it is that the anti-obesity 'experts' can predict what will happen in 19 years?

We aren't getting fatter. Yet across the country the New Puritans are gearing up to argue for new "nudging" taxes, for bans on advertising and for controls over transfats. All to deal with a non-existent problem.

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