Cristopher Snowdon

Big fat myths

Childhood obesity is falling. Adult obesity is flatlining. And it’s longevity that really costs the NHS

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[/audioplayer] Like all failing projects, or popular cults, the NHS needs scapegoats. Britain’s health service is plagued by an endless stream of deviants who are a ‘burden’ on its resources. Otherwise known as patients, they are the drinkers, smokers and fatsos who, we are told, will bring the NHS to its knees unless lifestyles are regulated by the state.

Smokers were a useful scapegoat for a while. Now it’s the obesity ‘time bomb’. As Simon Stevens, the chief executive of the NHS, recently put it, ‘The new smoking is obesity.’ He claims that fatties will cost the NHS far more than the £8 billion he wangled out of George Osborne before the election.

Much of the fear about obesity rests on the belief that it is a spiralling epidemic. Properly defined, an epidemic is a temporary outbreak of contagious disease in a specific community. The gradual rise of corpulence in Britain in recent decades is neither fleeting nor infectious nor localised. The term ‘epidemic’ has been adopted to stoke the illusion that being fat is an issue of public health requiring government action when it is really an issue of personal health and private behaviour.

Whatever we choose to call it, obesity is not spiralling. Rates of childhood obesity are in fact falling. Adult obesity is flatlining. So the hysteria can only be maintained through predictions of a future catastrophe. In 2006 a Department of Health report predicted that 28 per cent of women and 33 per cent of men would be obese by 2010. The fateful year came and went with obesity rates of 26 per cent for both sexes.

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