BY ALEX STORY
We beat Argentina and lost to France, not in football unfortunately, but in the fat stakes.
With nearly 40% of its adult population being obese, Argentina ranks 36th out of 193 countries in the world.
France, with only 10%, is 172nd.
Britain, for her part, is listed as 77th according to the Global Obese Observatory.
American Samoa wins the overall prize with three quarters of her population on the very heavy side.
Egypt, Kuwait and Qatar lead the way in the fat race after the Pacific Islands, placing 15th, 16th and 17th respectively.
America, not too far behind, stands a couple of spots back at 19th.
While, from a bird’s-eye British perspective, it makes for reassuring reading, nearly a third of her adult population is obese.
In real numbers, there are a staggering 15 million obese adults in Britain.
As many, it turns out, as the servicemen who served the British Empire over the course of both world wars.
Digging a little deeper, the National Health Service found that “the proportion of children living with obesity was between 12.6% and 17.7%”.
Once you are obese, of course, all sorts of things start going wrong, such as the “onset of non-communicable diseases like Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases”, among other things.
In short, experts say, as only experts can, that being very fat brings with it “substantial economic losses”.
The loss of vitality is very concerning, particularly when it afflicts such a large part of the supposedly active population.
Many of our overweight, however, don’t work.
A study from the University of York showed that over 600,000 people are “too fat to work“, and those who do will not do so with the dynamism of someone who is fit and healthy.
In either case, these add to the tax burden, which the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development warned is already “too high in Britain“.
Public sector debt, at £3 trillion, is close to 100% of GDP and welfare represents a quarter of our government’s expenditure.
Part of that largesse will inevitably find its way to the obese via a set of benefits such as the Working Age & Children Welfare (£145 billion), Disability & Sickness Benefits (£77 billion), and Housing Benefits (£37 billion).
As night follows day, Andy Burnham, our new and anointed Socialist Leader, will be raising taxes.
Looking for proper alternatives would require more fantasy than successive governments have hitherto shown.
As he recently said himself, he will have “to ask for a little more” from taxpayers during an interview with Gary Lineker on the former England forward’s Goalhanger podcast.
Ignoring all the while Winston Churchill, who contended during an address at the Free Trade League in 1904 that “for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle”.
Obesity is thus a personal problem with great national repercussions, which developed in a country in which “judgementalism” has become anathema.
Indeed, the individual can act as he wishes in the knowledge that society broadly defined will pick up the costly pieces.
Thus, discipline, the only plausible remedy for this ailment, is rarely trumpeted.
Alternatives that are less arduous are sought. As a result, medicine, with its inherent side effects, becomes part of the main solution.
And, in the short term, it can work.
Drugs, such as Ozempic, have slowed obesity’s progress, the rates of which have flattened over the last few years.
However, this is a long-term problem that cannot easily be resolved by quick fixes.
In fundamental ways, Ozempic and diets are similar.
Once you stop, your weight goes up again.
The difference is simply that if you take the drug for too long, in too strong a dosage, the side effects become more evident.
Indeed, the body feeds off fat and muscle simultaneously right from the start; it leaves the user much weaker than when he started.
And because the drug aims to create a calorie deficit to lose weight, it is designed to chemically alter the “hunger” signals, so you don’t feel the hunger in the first place.
But when you stop using the drug, your hunger strikes back again and you often start to eat as you have always done, ensuring your body weight increases.
It is the discipline of changing your eating habits that makes the long-term difference, particularly because relatively cheap and accessible foods abound.
The difference between a drug and a diet is simply that the first deceives your body, while the second changes your habits.
The latter is the solution, however inconvenient and unpalatable that might sound.
Fighting against obesity is, in truth, a longer-term problem that requires deep-seated personal eating changes.
The rise of obesity, though, is not just a problem in the United Kingdom; it is a global one.
Part of the reason is not just the cheapening of food; it is its consistency, ingredients, abundance and regulation.
A great part of the problem, which has cost millions of lives over the last decades, has been the victory of the view that “fat causes fat”, pushed by American nutritionist Ancel Keys, whose research was developed throughout much of the 1960s, and which culminated in George McGovern’s 1977 Senate debate on Nutrition and Human Need.
McGovern then appointed Nick Mottern, whose report recommended that “the American populace limit its fat diet to 30 percent of their diet and saturated fat to 10 percent”, according to Doctor Robert Lustig.
Mottern’s brainchild, Dietary Goals for the United States, was implemented and the food industry changed, reminding all that supposedly wise government intervention in most fields regularly worsens a problem rather than improves it.
It replaced fat with sugar first and then with High-Fructose Corn Syrup, among other things.
John Yudkin, of Queen Elizabeth College, London, on the other hand, researching during the same period, published his seminal work: Pure, White and Deadly. He hoped “that when you have read this book, I shall have convinced you that sugar is really dangerous”.
But he was ignored and obesity took off worldwide.
The solution is simple but difficult to implement.
Discipline is the only way out, willpower the only tool.
As Matthew said, “enter through the narrow gate”.
“For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
Today, in Britain, we have millions walking across the broad and wide gate with our governments and regulators playing solidarity tunes.
Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.