A JOB FOR NANNY
Fat people aren't victims, says Tania Kindersley. They're just fat, and it's time
they were urged to shape up
WE are all vast now. Columnists, doctors, cross-bench committees and government ministers desperately inveigh against the epidemic of obesity, the rising tide of fat that will swamp us all, We may have put a man on the moon, but we can't get off the sofa to change the television channel.
There is nothing simple about obesity except the statistics, which are stark: annually, 30,000 deaths in Britain; cost to NHS £500,000: cost to general economy £2 billion. The clinically overweight face illness and shortened life-expectancy; children are developing Type 2 diabetes, previously only seen in adults. Family dinners are dead and everyone eats at garish, soulless burger bars — the unhappy meal.
In panic, newspapers and opinion-formers frantically hunt the bogeyman: globalisation, the diet industry, fast-food corporations; inequality, feckless working mothers, societal meltdown; television and video games, faltering education, meretricious and amoral advertising.
The arguments are circular and complicated by guilt. Ministers and the middle classes are embarrassed by the fact that on an innercity estate in shiny, 21st-century Britain you can buy drugs more easily than vegetables; that a bag of watercress, packed with nutritious iron and vitamin C, costs £1.15, while a tin of spaghetti hoops, rich in additives and chemicals, goes for 25p. But, as Jeanette Winterson recently wrote, to call it a class issue is not enough: tackling poverty will not eradicate obesity. Any government serious about the nation's health would have to address the long-hours culture, reintroduce domestic science, and re-open sports grounds in schools; tax the hawkers of fast and artificial food, and subsidise the hell out of green vegetables. Kale instead of crack should be the cry ringing round Whitehall.
This could happen, if enough people kept at it for the next 20 years. But the immediate problem is not nutritional deficiency, it is obesity. And diet isn't the only, even the major, factor in obesity. Whether we eat more is a matter of contested statistics; undeniably we are doing less. The fat graph has soared exponentially over the last 40 years, following the rise of the car and the sedentary job.
The debate is hobbled by an unhelpful delicacy, a tentative eggshell-walking. Creeping political correctness has produced a terror of offending anyone. In America fat is the new f-word — instead, it's nutritionally endowed, or person of mass, or gravitationally challenged. Big Is Beautiful, and if an airline insists that you buy two seats to accommodate your bulk, sue the bastards and declare that you are striking a blow for civil rights.
This produces a warped moral perspective. The director of the American Obesity Association has described fatism as 'a return to the worst kind of discrimination. It's like putting African-Americans at the back of the bus.' This is not only a fantastically honkers equation, but carries the dangerous implication that fatness is not a health hazard but a blow for freedom.
We in Britain are not as extreme, but obesity is still discussed in terms of victims, stigmatisation, prejudice. Suggestions of exercise or more carrots are dismissed by the fat lobby as fascist rubbish, designed to make fat people feel bad about themselves. Health campaigners are described without irony as Stalinists (which, as well as being very silly, is rather insensitive to the millions exterminated by Stalin). The government offers toothless and uncontroversial plans for a piece of fruit a day by 2004; when in charge of health, Yvette Cooper declared that she would avoid being prescriptive because the nanny state is a 'turn off. In fact, this is one of the few areas where Nanny, if she shot from the hip, could be useful. (Imagine a canny mix of Mary Poppins and Annie Oakley — spit-spot and kick-ass.) Socio-political commentators insist that it is a platitude to reduce obesity to a question of personal choice — the fat are victims of pernicious economic and social forces. This is all very caring and correct, but it lands the obese in no man's land. A skewed blame-culture renders the individual hapless, and therefore helpless, before the evil capitalist empire. In effect, it is just as dangerous as drug companies insisting that the answer is a pill: pharmaceutical shares soar with each new obesity drug, and the sideeffects are quietly ignored. Meanwhile, the 19-stone man with the stapled stomach and the size-30 woman who grows breathless from walking upstairs are neither aided nor comforted by the information that they are merely diseased or a product of their time.
Excess fat is bad for you, as had as excessive drinking or unfettered smoking, and a lot less fun. Drinkers and smokers are informed of the consequences of their habits, they pay their money and take their chance — why should bald words on obesity be considered mean to fat people? All eating disorders are horrible and debilitating. In the streets of Notting Hill, rich, successful women embrace perpetual hunger in the name of fashion; affluent mothers pour Fairy Liquid on to their children's left-over fishfingers to avoid temptation; models exist on cigarettes and cocaine to sell us visions of beauty; websites advertise The Joy of Puking for bulimic& Being morbidly fat is just as frightening as being unnaturally skinny, and comes from the same source: misery, self-dislike, a feeling of powerlessness. The problem with Fat Is Happy, Fat Is Beautiful is that often the very fat feel neither, and end up stigmatised by those who purport to love them most: when Sheila Bovey, a leading size-acceptance campaigner, decided to lose weight, she expected hate mail from her own movement.
We need tough love, a more useful love. I have heard a radical voice gleefully calling for the return of shame, a collective cry of 'Get up, Fatso! — Name-Calling Saves Lives'. This is a little extreme for me, but invigorating empowerment is better than a mealy mouth: let's not patronise the dangerously overweight by imagining that their poor, tender sensibilities can't take straight talk.
We have not reached the proportions of America, where George Dubya putting on his Nikes seems like the little boy sticking his finger in the dyke; there is time to halt the great British bulge if anyone is brave enough to grasp the nettle. The reason that this government's initiatives are so tentative and piecemeal — a swimming club here, a pamphlet there — is that it is afraid of causing offence. Refusing to treat fat people as responsible, robust adults is as demeaning as pointing and laughing. A serious publichealth issue, especially one that affects children, is surely the concern of the state, even if the libertarians will cry foul.
Although I have a secret dream of the erstwhile Minister for Health standing up and yelling, like Eliza Doolittle, 'Come on, Britain, shift yer bleedin' arse,' no one will wear a politician as exemplar (the sight of David Mellor and Edwina Currie in tracksuits may have put the fitness drive back decades). But we have a cunning and influential advertising and marketing industry; we live in an
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