Obesity only a symptom of an allergy to sense

THOSE of you familiar with the obesity debate will find no reason to smile when confronted with the other end of the story — starvation and destitution in the underdeveloped countries of the world.

Even in Ireland the young are developing into blubbery objects of scorn, waddling along the streets with oversized burgers and fries in their chubby hands.

Concern for the plight of the young and indeed not so young is mounting across the developed world due to bad eating habits.

They are now discovering level two diabetes in teenagers that until recently was an issue only for those over 50 years old. Obesity is also associated with high blood pressure and coronary heart disease.

The evidence is becoming all to clear that this is where the West is headed.

It has been argued that people's body mechanisms determine their weight their metabolism etc.

Some years ago, experts decided the amount of brown fat as opposed to white fat was critical in deciding what people weighed. Brown fat burned off easier, it was alleged.

That theory seems to have died a death.

And after all the hype about the Atkins Diet, researchers have concluded the key to its "success" was that people ate more protein, which, they discovered, helps stave off hunger and people on the diet therefore ate less.

Most mothers feeding families in this country, certainly those of the older generation, knew that a good helping of meat or other forms of protein, staved off hunger and that bread made you fat.

It might sound like common sense, but it took scientists working for the Panorama television programme a few months of research to come to those blinding realisations.

This would be laughable if it wasn't so serious. Corporations and tin-pot theories about weight are taking over our lives.

Which brings me to the allergy phase so common in 1980s Dublin.

If your child had a runny nose they were allergic to dairy products. Dairy products were blamed for virtually everything medically wrong with the younger generation.

One child who had been suffering badly from an allergy was taken to Sean Boylan, the herbalist and manager of Meath's football team.

In five minutes Mr Boylan had treated the condition. A vertebrae was out of place in the child's neck. This, in turn, was pressing on his lymph gland which controls the flow of mucus in the nose.

His allergy doctor would have had the child on soya milk for the rest of his life, having spent a few minutes waving rubber pads under his feet. He was wrong. After visiting Mr Boylan, the boy's nose cleared within an hour.

So where is all of this going, you may well ask?

I started out on obesity. Now those who have eaten themselves into obesity are trying to put the blame on the purveyors of the dodgy products, and while I have little time for the burger corporations and what they represent, there is a grave danger that the issue of personal responsibility is being abandoned.

Corporate responsibility is also being abandoned, and the sad reality is that the issue of food production, food consumption, EU subsidies, growth hormones, Mad Cow disease, foot and mouth, all point to a world where values have been forced to give way to expediency.

Ultimately it all comes back to what each of us do to our bodies and to the planet we inhabit.

It seems a process of alienation has taken place that has undermined common sense and basic human decency.

The end result has been a catalogue of disasters, much of which can be attributed to the fact that people have lost confidence in themselves and have handed over key decisions to others.

Food producers and processors who deal with that question stand to do well, provided we pull back from the brink in time.