Obesity is not in the genes, it’s in people stuffing their faces with food
Dear Andrew Lansley,
Having declared to the nation that a recession could be “good for us” in many ways, much to the delight of the government, I understand why your handlers are keeping you away from the spotlight. Cameron and Osborne are clearly concerned about the ‘tax bombshell’ that Brown & Co. are going to leave this country with should they lose the next election. As Shadow Health Secretary, you will have to worry far more about the ‘obesity bombshell’ that is threatening to decimate our health service. It is with regret that I read in the papers today about how scientists are claiming that obesity may be pre-programmed into our bodies, as they have identified six genes with predispose their carriers to becoming heavily overweight.
The statistics on obesity are shocking. Only a few days ago it was reported with a certain sense of irony that by the time the Olympics appear in 2012, one in three adults (13 million people) will be obese. By age 11, 33% of children are now obese and this figure has held steady for several years. 10% of children are already obese by the time they begin reception at school. 9,000 people die each year from obesity-related illnesses. The government has thrown plenty of money at the problem and continues release new initiatives on public health with alarming regularity but to no avail. Advertising campaigns don’t work, measuring children’s waistlines at school hasn’t changed anything and giving people extra information has little impact on their attitudes. Top-down solutions are destined to fail from the moment they begin. The question of where that leaves the Conservatives from a policy perspective is a fascinating one. The new research released today showed that the vast majority of the six newly discovered genes appear to cause carriers to eat more, rather than affect their body’s ability to process fat. Carriers with all six of the genes would be an average of almost five pounds overweight, the scientists estimate, and some much heavier. Experts believe that these sorts of genetic variation could account for 40-70% of the variation in Body Mass Index found in the population. Yer, right. Here’s my theory: people get fat because they eat too much. People get fat because they don’t do enough exercise. People get fat because they don’t understand the very simple relationship between ‘calories in’ and ‘calories out’. Until you get this message through to people, they won’t listen.
A future Conservative government needs to take a two-pronged approach to obesity. Firstly, get some personal responsibility into the equation. Genes don’t make you fat; eating too much makes you fat. If people eat too much and become obese, draw a line in the sand and tell the country that the NHS will not fund their treatment for obesity-related operations such as stomach stapling, liposuction, gastric banding and gastric bypass operations. There is no justification for spending taxpayers’ cash on these procedures, given that people got themselves into the hole in the first place and now that they’re very fat, they can’t get back out of the hole (the mental image is very appropriate). The taxpayer should not be digging them out – it should be the responsibility of the individual to lose weight and once they have done so, they will be able to lift themselves back out of the hole without a penny of my taxes being spent. This deferential attitude towards the state is extremely damaging. The state should be there to help those who need help and deserve help i.e. the state should support those who are unable to support themselves, not those who are unwilling to support themselves. Secondly, give primary and secondary schools control over their curriculum. This top-down, state-led education system is wasting everyone’s time and denies schools the chance to educate their pupils properly. If parental school choice became the norm, schools would compete with each other to provide the best possible curriculum and I am sure that well-devised and age-appropriate education on lifestyle and health would be part of their lessons. The government has no need to get involved, although I appreciate that socialists don’t generally grasp this concept.
I have heard countless Conservative cabinet members and ministers saying that this economic crisis will force the current and future governments for our country to ensure that we get value-for-money. Spending millions of pounds propping up a fat society (pun intended) is an outrageous waste of money and gives people entirely the wrong signals. David Cameron can talk about ‘nudging’ people to do the right thing all he wants, but if you try to nudge an obese person your hand will probably get swallowed up by their rolls of fat and you will not change their behaviour one bit. The real question here is will you resist the temptation to churn about Labour-esque initiatives via press release that promise everything and change nothing, or will you actually deal with this problem?
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
Witanagemot Blogs
I have a long running argument with a former Conservative Councillor who resolutely refuses to believe that Food Eaten – Exercise Done = How Fat You Are. Oddly enough he’s overweight, will drive around for an extra 30 minutes to park 5 minutes walk closer to his destination and he bought a treadmill for his dog as y’know… walking.
On the other hand you have official (for what THAT is worth!) health advice that if you eat less junk food and exercise more, you will be a healthier weight. Meanwhile we have the same state say that obesity is a disability worthy of protection under the Disability Discrimination Act. Which annoys me as I have MS and a simple bit of dietary advice won’t cure my disability! Lumping the fat, who can presumably (and in general) choose to not be disabled in with us genuine cripples devalues crippledom and elevates an unhealthy lifestyle choice to an unassailable position.
How did we end up in this position? Well, it didn’t all happen under nuLab. The Conservatives starting to sell off school playing fields and simultaneously seeing the role of sport downgraded in schools was a big part of it. The emergent fear culture of Paedos-Paedos-Everywhere meant kids stayed in rather than running about outside and the exponential growth of home entertainment (home cinema, videogames, computers) made that an easy and safe option. Couple this with the ‘all must have prizes’ approach to sport (which was cast off, just, for the Olympics this year) and you can see how a lazy, non-competitive, housebound culture has grown up. Hell, if we do see teenagers outside we either run screaming in terror or switch on the Mosquito. At least they can’t waddle after us fast enough to catch up.
I don’t know how we could begin to unpick this. You’re not going to shift the patterns of entertainment although the Wii does at least show gaming doesn’t have to be sedentary and it IS the best selling console. The role of sport in school will have to be looked at again and I feel the DDA protection for fatties needs to be removed. Shame and mockery may have a role to play in instilling some personal responsibility into the pie-guzzlers but, electorally, with 33% of people overweight, I’d not want to be a politician going to the country on that platform!
“Meanwhile we have the same state say that obesity is a disability worthy of protection under the Disability Discrimination Act.”
Absent people with medical conditions (such as Prader-Willi syndrome), there’s absolutely no excuse for this.
“How did we end up in this position? Well, it didn’t all happen under nuLab. The Conservatives starting to sell off school playing fields…”
There’s a lot of legislation that the Conservatives introduced that has had unexpected consequences far down the line. But this is definitely one of the key factors.
these sorts of genetic variation could account for 40-70% of the variation in Body Mass Index found in the population
Taking the lower end of this scale, this means that most of the variation is not due to genetic issues. Or, that even with these alleged genetic predispositions, it is still possible for the “afflicted” to be fit and healthy. If they wanted to.
At least they can’t waddle after us fast enough to catch up.
ROFL!
The problem of obesity starts in childhood. Kids sitting in front of the TV and computers. I am probably just as guilty as other parents of allowing these pastimes. I used to be quite happy for my daughters to play outside until we experienced several nasty instances which put their well being in danger (including one exposer) and that put paid to playing in the street!
I tried to keep them active, but sports facilities are expensive if you have a couple of kids and very time consuming for working parents.
Therein the problem begins, it is of course compounded in schools with non-competitive sports which I completely objected to. My kids had no incentive to compete or win in any events and were less than enthusiastic. Coupled with the fact that the obese PE teacher’s idea of supervising a sports lesson on a freezing cold day, was for the kids to run around him in a circle while he drank his cup of hot coffee wrapped up in his big heavy coat!
In most parents’ bid to keep their heads above water financially they both have to work full time. Its easier to get a pizza out of the freezer than to prepare a proper dinner. I attempted to supply a range of home cooked and pre prepared foods depending on time issues but its not always easy unless you don’t mind eating at 9 oclock at night!
Our social culture is not the healthiest in the world either. An evening out for most is invariably getting drunk down the pub and then eating a curry.
The weather in Britain has alot to do with the fact that we don’t spend alot of time in outdoor pursuits but the government does little to ensure that there are plenty of well funded, cheap sports facilities around for people to spend their time in, they would rather spend billions refurbishing their offices!
Lastly, we have the Wayne and Waynettas of the UK. Those who sit around on benefits watching Sky Movies on their plasma TV’s whilst tucking into takeaways! If they would get off their backsides and do an honest days work, perhaps they would eat less and lose weight!
I think Sue’s point about diet is crucial here. The change in diet of many families over the past 10-15 years has been in completely the wrong direction, as far more fatty foods (e.g. takeaways, fast food) have become the norm. It’s cheap and it’s easy to get hold of. School playing fields are part of the problem but I think diet and general lifestyle (parents dumping kids in front of TV etc) are far more to blame.
The other thing, of course, is that Schools don’t teach kids to cook any more. I was lucky, I guess and caught the fag-end of ‘home-economics’ teaching before the facilities became too expensive and the subject drowned in a mire of PC anti-sexism, pro-feminist twaddle…
Jamie Oliver, the mockney wee shit, has it all wrong. Don’t teach adults, don’t just hector schools into having proper kitchens for cooking school lunches, go after the Education department and make home-economics or ‘cooking’ a bloody lesson again. And ffs, don’t slap a target and grades on it, just impart skills and knowledge to kids and see what happens in 10-15 years!
We have, ironically, benefited hugely from the discovery that Mrs P has a serious food intolerance. The paucity of decent prepared food that is genuinely gluten-free means that, in the main, we prepare all our food from scratch. Not from choice (Sue is quite right re the time pressures), but simply through necessity.
As a result, our diet is now better than it has ever been – fresh natural ingredients, home cooked!
Glad to hear it, Patently.
Shaun, this is what I mean about giving schools control over their curriculum. Some schools (namely academic ones) might choose to appeal to high-flyers so may not put cookery lessons on but I bet many schools would. Until schools can respond to local demand with an appropriate education, this downward spiral will simply pick up pace.
I don’t think you could say that ‘high flyers’ should not be taught cookery skills. I was always top-streamed for maths, english et al so under that system, they’d not have taught me anything about cooking at all.
At the end of the day, sport/exercise and cooking get foisted onto schools as people don’t have the facilities, time or knowledge to do teach their kids at home. On a broader level, this is actually a public health issue, much as vaccination is (which also happens at schools), and would equip children with skills and habits that they will need for effective lives irrespective of their ultimate academic/career destination and so should be taught to all. Its not an autonomy issue as far as I can see!
No no no no no, let the schools decide. If a school has to compete for pupils in a school-choice system they will put on the curriculum that is most popular and appropriate for their potential intake.
If a school wants to concentrate on academic subjects then that’s fine and if they want to concentrate on more vocational and applied subjects then that’s fine too – the government should not be involved and cooking should not be compulsory. Let the parents and pupils set the course of education.
Err … I passed the 11+, went to a grammar school, and never had a single cookery lesson in my life.
Nevertheless, in ten days’ time I will be cooking a full Christmas dinner for 12 with all the trimmings, gluten free in every respect bar the bread sauce, from scratch. The only prepared ingredient will be the sausages and the sausagement. It will, I think, be the fourth or fifth time I do so.
Cooking is not difficult. Come on – even Jamie Oliver can do it. You just need the motivation to learn it; and if you haven’t got that, then I doubt that any number of cookery lessons in your teens will help. If you have the time to buy a potato and an onion and make a nice tasty rosti, but would rather spend five times as much on some oven chips, then the problem is that you are lazy – not that you can’t cook.
Shaun Pilkington has got it right, as he often does
Part of the problem is that children are not allowed to be children, & this is largely due not to legislation but due to culture, & can be reversed by a cultural shift were it ever to happen. I would raise the school entrance age, as happens in other countries. Youngsters will grow up to be better educated in the real sense if they are free to follow their own curiosity, in terms of play & exploration of the natural world. (It would certainly work wonders if parents took their children into the countryside on a regular basis, as mine did, but very few others followed suit).
They should likewise have more space to follow their own bent at school, & teachers should be free to take them down the most suitable paths, rather than battery farming which will meet certain central outcomes.
There should be a role for sport & cooking in schools. I actually heard of a primary school near me, on one of the most deprived estates going, where parents can go to school alongside their children & learn the basic skills they never acquired in their own younger days. It would humiliate you, but these people are very keen to respond to voluntary schemes.
I do get a bit frustrated with people moaning about being fat. One thing that never fails to wind me up is Kira Cochrane’s column, “The reluctant dieter”. Does she really not understand that she needs to stop eating & do exercise in order not to be fat? I deny myself foods that I like, & do exercise that I hate , because I want to maintain my self-respect, just as I’ve worked in thankless jobs for years on end. (I have tried the alternative & it is even worse).
I developed my own idea about healthy living because of education. I remember my biology teacher talking about the evils of Sunny Delight & McDonald’s. We were free to ignore her, of course, & most did exactly that, but the information was there & I made use of it.
Most of the unemployed are genuinely having problems. But the obese have got to pull themselves together. I don’t know what I would do about parents who let their children get fat, but I wouldn’t shed any tears if they were punished.
You can talk about how depression etc leads to overeating. In my case, I have a tendency to overeat (which I resist) because I enjoy it. But it isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs being a plumper, & people who complain of mental health whilst being physically unhealthy have got to be asking themselves whether their mental problems are exacerbated by their woeful diet & lifestyle in general.
>> Let the parents and pupils set the course of education.
Hear hear.
People should be introduced to the best of English cuisine. It is a little-known fact that we have an excellent heritage. You can go to a farmers’ market & pick up some excellent local produce. There’s no need to be giving money to parasitical middle men. You can even grow your own food, & certainly cook from scratch. I make a load at weekends & freeze it. I thereby don’t have to cook during the week.
You can make something like flapjacks incredibly easily. It tastes a lot better than the bilge produced in factories. A proper soup is also something to savour.
I do draw the line at growing my own. I haven’t got much excuse, I just can’t be a****. But, while others sneer, I just point out that their life on junk food leaves them out of pocket, fat & unhappy.
I’m very wary of pure localism, be it for directly elected policemen or for grabbing control of a school. The reason being its relatively easy for small groups of cranks to seize control and its harder to oust them for average people. In education as layed out above, if schools can choose their own curriculum then what’s to stop a bunch of Creationists refusing to teach evolution in biology or adding in creationism or, if not allowed to do that, not teach biology at all?
The point here is that much as they play a role in public health through vaccination and nit screening programmes, schools have an inalienable role, now (in a world where both parents work, usually, and traditional gender roles are a thing of the past), in equipping pupils with some skills that they just need in life. And, really, exercise and cooking are clearly public health goods too.
Funny aside – I’m 6′6″ tall and was a bit overweight at about 14-15 stone. Two things happened. I got MS and, rather than taking it easy I resolved to keep as active as possible because aside from any (arguable) use-it-or-lose-it aspect to neurological functionality, I am very aware that if I bring on mechanical problems through not getting enough exercise, I’d be in far deeper do-do than I would be otherwise. So I got a dog and jumped on a crazy ultra-low saturated fat diet due to some interesting observational science over a critically long period.
Anyway, the upshot is that I’ve lost loads of weight. 2 walks a day with the mutt and bugger all saturated fat (well < 20g /day) and now I just can’t keep weight on! Lucky I have nothing else to worry about, eh?
Going back to fundamentals, it might be that the figures came from the Ministry of Bogus Statistics that many of us have been complaining about.
Taking care not to be CCTV’d as a potential paedophile (rotten word) I’ve been observing local junior age children – there being a lot of “crocodiles” about at this time of the year. In this small market town, with 30+(?) “eateries” about 1 child in 30 is clearly overweight, and less than 1 in 30 might be obese.
It’s more difficult to assess teenagers, but the increase seems to be very small.
For adults, just looking around at shoppers it’s clear that that’s where the problems are, but even so well below the MoBS figures.
I agree that a lot of obesity, probably all, is due to lifestyle. But I’m sure that there are a lot of people out there who are just on he overweight side and if they didn’t have those genes then they’d probably be slim. So these people have to work extra hard to take the weight off. If you were to stop fat people from getting treatment then you should also remove NHS treatment for the people who have got bowel cancer from not eating a healthy diet and any other bad diet related illness.
There is also the behavioural aspect which has a lot to do with how your parents responded to food when you were young. And it’s not just the Mcdonalds mums that are causing the problem but possibly also the one’s who think they’re doing the right thing by banning anything sweet or snack like. I grew up in a household where raw carrots and a handful of sunflower seeds were treats. So obviously when I first got a newspaper round wage – it all got reinvested at the corner shop and more flavoursome snacks. I have since grown out of that and work damn hard not to consider every snack food as the last one I might ever get … gobble gooble. And of course there is the 5 times a week gym trip.
Finally, I have a great solution. Instead of having an alcohol aisle at the supermarket – have a fatties aisle – so anyone buying snack food as to queue up in the extra-wide fatty aisle. Oh the shame….
I’d definitely point and laugh at those in a ‘fatty aisle’.
I would indeed ask for financial contributions towards NHS treatment for everyone who develops a condition that is scientifically proven (and has been ‘re-proven’ many times over) to be linked to their behaviour. I wouldn’t ask for the whole amount because you can’t technically ‘prove’ that smoking caused cancer in an individual case, but I reckon a 25% contribution is a nice comprimise.
I agree that people get lardy because they stuff their faces and don’t exercise, end of story. And I agree that personal responsibility is key. But then:
“A future Conservative government needs to take a two-pronged approach to obesity.”
No. ANY future government needs to take a zero-pronged approach to obesity. Since when was it within any government’s remit to tell us what not to eat?
What they need to do is sack any useless, interfering Quangos who like to call themselves diet ‘experts’, and then let parents, schools, and even the pilsbury doughboys weebling down our streets to the BurgerMe bar, decide for themselves what they want to eat.
Aren’t the Conservatives supposed to be about personal responsibility and small government?
Quite. If I want to get fat and die young then that is my choice and it is no business of HMG to stop me.
However, LFAT’s first prong is about making me accept the consequences of my choice – i.e. that I will either have to pay for the surgery that I make necessary, or die even younger. And the second prong makes me aware of the nature of the choice that I am making, and the ways that I can exercise (sorry) my freedom to choose, by allowing me to be educated as to the consequences of being fat and the ways by which I can avoid it, if I choose to.
I believe that a Conservative government should put their faith in personal responsibility. By all means let people make their own choices, but the government should make the consequences of those choices perfectly clear.
government should make the consequences of those choices perfectly clear
How far do we take this? If a guy injures himself in a car accident that is self-evidently his fault (found in the vehicle with his trousers around his knees and his willy out, as in once recent case), should the emergency services refuse to treat him/rescue him? If we simply choose to invoice said, ahem, masturbator then all we really do is create another insurance market where the feckless rich become strangely liberated.
With respect to lifestyle illnesses and cancers which increase in prevalence with certain behaviours, would it not perhaps be better to say that ‘we’ll still help you but realistically you’re probably still going to die and us helping you will be painful and traumatic and most likely unsuccessful so you’re better off doing everything in your power, yes, YOUR power, to avoid getting it’. To instil personal responsibility, you have to tell people how things are, not how they’d wish them to be.
“…the government should make the consequences of those choices perfectly clear.”
I take your point,LFAT, but I reckon it’s hard to get right. As Shaun says, How far do we take this?
I’m sure many a Quango started out with good intentions about educating us all to the consequences of being fatties, smokers and boozers, but I think it will inevitably end up with hundreds and hundreds of the buggers, a huge network of the Righteous, ‘experts’, poking around into our private lives. People don’t like it. It breeds resentment. How many quangos are there now? 1400 or something? Would the Tories cut them right back?
The only way to educate people about personal responsibility is to give it to them. In other words leave them alone.
As for healthcare, ideally yes, people who choose to live on a diet of salt, deep-fried Mars Bars and Turps, should pay for their health care. But I think that has more to do with dismantling the Soviet Healthcare System we have.
salt, deep-fried Mars Bars and Turps
Oh, did you live in Glasgow once too?
If a guy injures himself in a car accident that is self-evidently his fault
Rescue him, treat him, prosecute him for driving without due care and attention. Combines both due compassion for those in need and personal responsibility for the consequences of his actions.
Reminds me of my flying training. On detachment to a Scottish airfield, we pointed out that there were few suitable fields in which to carry out a forced landing if we should suffer an engine failure, and asked an instructor what we should do if we were below parachute height. He suggested that both crew memebers should undress and get into a compromising position. When asked if that would help, he said “No, but it will give the crash investigators something interesting to think about”.
How much of that “epidemic” is real?
As a governor of my local primary school (400+ kids), I would have noticed more than 30% of fat kids! Where does obese start?
I am quite sure that a lot of this is job creation for whoever is “in charge” of this problem (such as there is one). The use of the word epidemic is quite symptomatic, because it makes it sound like an illness, and therefore removes responsibility from people (like much of the things a government does).
I have also little time for the “working parents do not have time” argument. There is a lot of lazyness. Both my wife and me work full time, it does not stop my kids going to sport activities almost everyday (which means most days end at 8pm when they go to bed), including both weekend days. Try coaching rugby on sunday mornings when its cold and it rains (the kids turn up though, and they’re under 7s!). The food as a rule is home made.
There are plenty of ways and help if one bothers to look for them. But it is so much easier to do nothing, and blame the “epidemic”.