The obesity epidemic - the cause and the cure

A growing problem

If the official stats are to be believed, obesity is well on the way to becoming the biggest socio-economic issue of our time. In the US, around two-thirds of adults are presently classified as being overweight or obese, whilst in the UK the figure is 64 per cent. What is most alarming is the rate at which obesity levels are rising. In the UK, the proportion of adults who are obese (i.e. have a body mass index of 30 or higher) has more than doubled in the last twenty years, from 14% in the mid-1990s to 36% today. All age groups are affected, including pre-teen children.

If you are overweight, you are at much greater risk of suffering from diabetes, heart disease, strokes, cancer and many other life-threatening illnesses. As more people become obese, the health service will be under ever-increasing strain and ultimately may not be able to cope. The economic consequences of an unchecked obesity epidemic for the world's richer nations could be ruinous, and for the less wealthy countries a humanitarian disaster is looming.

But there is hope - the trend can be reversed

We should take some comfort from the fact that the obesity pandemic which is now sweeping the western world and spreading to less developed countries is no Biblical plague or similar unstoppable disaster. It is something that is entirely within the power of individuals to resist. It doesn't require governments to get on their high horse and force through new laws to get us to eat more lettuce and spend more time walking the dog.

All it needs is for each of us to make the decision not to become overweight, by eating a healthier diet and leading more active lives. Of course, government initiatives to (a) promote the virtues of healthy eating and (b) oblige food manufacturers to clearly mark their products as beneficial or harmful (using, say, a simple health score) may help.

What has caused the obesity epidemic?

Assuming that no one really wants to be chronically overweight, you have to ask yourself the question: just why is obesity such a big problem today? People didn't always used to be overweight on this scale. When I was growing up in the 1970s I can't remember many people having a serious weight problem. If people were portly it was usually because they were made that way - i.e. had an abnormally slow metabolic rate. Now obesity seems to be all around us and getting progressively worse.

In the mid-70s, I can recall watching an American TV show called The Invaders in which a man named David Vincent (played by Roy Thinnes) is fighting a losing battle against invading aliens who could take on a human form. Four decades on, I can't help feeling like David Vincent, watching helplessly as the entire human population of Earth is being replaced by oversized human substitutes.

Every other person you see in the streets seems to have a weight problem, and already the pavements are starting to fill up with mobility scooters driven by individuals (many visibly under the age of retirement) who are morbidly obese and worryingly myopic. Assuming I am wrong and this is not a planet-wide invasion by a life-form afflicted with chronic bad taste or a serious hormone imbalance, just what exactly is causing all this?

Well, our busy, 24x7 lifestyle is the explanation that routinely gets trotted out first. Our high-pressure, super-stressful lives leave little time for us to make the right choices for our health, so we end up making the wrong choices. We grab the first food item that comes to hand (it just happens to be pumped full of sugar) and we spend all our time sitting down because we are too stupid and too knackered to do otherwise. Clearly, if we are less physically active, we are going to find it harder to burn up the calories, so we're bound to put on weight. But can this really account for the massive increase in obesity rates we have seen over the last twenty years? I doubt it.

A more significant contributor to the obesity epidemic is the food industry - manufacturers, retailers and fast food outlets being equally culpable. I don't mean the smaller companies that take pride in their products and try to trade ethically. I'm talking about the megabucks national and international corporations whose sole raison d'être is to get as much money out of us as they possibly can, at the lowest possible cost to themselves without actually breaking the law. Few of these tax-dodging parasites have any concept of moral responsibility when it comes to public health issues and have but one goal: to make themselves and their shareholders as rich as possible with the least amount of effort whilst keeping the CEO out of jail. Their strategy is to create and sell products that are cleverly engineered to seduce as wide a section of the population as possible, and thereby ensure that we keep on buying these products in ever increasing amounts.

The big food corporations are not in the healthy eating business; they are in the addiction business. Many of their products are basically no more than drugs and what these companies are doing is a calculated attempt to turn the entire human population of Earth into drug addicts. So these 'drugs' don't frazzle your brain and turn you into a zombie like some Class A narcotics are reputed to do. They simply make you fat, raise your blood pressure, increase the chance that you will become diabetic and die from cancer, heart disease or a stroke.

And what appals me most is that practically all of these self-serving corporations carry on regardless even when it is now blindingly obvious that they are actively driving and possibly accelerating the obesity epidemic. Why should they change their ways when they are making so much money and no one can stop them?

If any government makes even the most half-hearted, lily-livered attempt to act against them, out come the cries in defence of 'consumer choice' from the morally indignant and congenitally obtuse, so the government ends up climbing down and diverting their feeble efforts to something more likely to placate the loud-mouthed liberalists. The big food corporations are untouchable, and they know it. They are never going to change.

The power of the big food corporations is frightening. Their advertising campaigns never fail to make their latest deep-fried sugary confection mouthwateringly irresistible. Most of what grabs our attention in the food aisles of supermarkets isn't food - it's row upon row of prettily wrapped and barely edible grot that has been carefully concocted in some laboratory with the sole aim of making us hopelessly and permanently addicted to it.

And the big food corporations have absolutely no qualms over targeting children, the most susceptible and influential members of any household. Once the kiddiewinks have been won over (anything in the shape of a dinosaur usually does the trick), the parents will soon follow. Those who cry out in defence of 'consumer choice' need a reality check. Consumer choice is virtually an irrelevance in a world in which such blatant and systematic brainwashing is going on. And, if consumer choice is such an inviolable right, how come governments act to limit the consumption of tobacco, alcohol and narcotics?

The only solution - do it yourself

With no government on the planet having the guts or the stamina to take on the Evil Food Empire what hope is there? Well, once the world economy has gone bust because no one acted in time to head off a completely foreseeable disaster (sounds familiar?), then maybe our spineless elected leaders may finally get round to taking measures to regulate the food industry and prevent it from turning us all into cancer-ridden human blancmanges. And if you believe that you'll believe anything.

No, the only hope that we have of beating the obesity plague is for each and every one of us to take a stand against the might of the food industry and start making better decisions over what we eat.

The food industry isn't actually forcing us to eat bad food; it is merely using its massive influence (helped by the power of the media and cute prehistoric reptiles) to make it as hard as possible for us to resist their pterodactyl-shaped junk.

We may be up against a consummately skilled brainwasher that has absolutely no interest in ensuring the survival of the human race, but we still have freedom of choice, and it is this freedom that we must exercise if we are to prevent humankind from eating itself to a fatty extinction.

© James Travers 2016