New research pours oil on troubled waters in hysterical debate on obesity

THEY must have been tempted to bury it. For several years, authorities in Europe and the USA have been moving inexorably towards a consensus that being overweight puts you in line for an early grave.

Our children were going to pop their clogs before their parents did, it was that bad.

McDonalds were trembling in their little golden arches at the prospect of governments bringing punitive taxes on frying oils. Obesity became the new swear word.

And you know what? One of the most comprehensive studies ever conducted has just found that while chair-breaking amplitude can certainly kill, mild overweight can do the same. Extra girth can be a life-extender. Not only that, but the researchers established that being very thin, even if the sveltness is not caused by disease, RAISES the risk of death. Raises it just a smidgeon. But still ...

When the figures began to emerge and were subjected to what’s been called the most rigorous scrutiny, some of the scientists involved, from the US Centres of Disease Control and Prevention, together with the US National Cancer Institute, must have wished to bend them a bit, to avoid embarrassing policy-makers throughout the western world, who were shaping up - literally - to attack the “killer disease” of overweight.

The new message is that only the morbidly obese, perhaps 8% of Americans and an even lower percentage of Europeans, are in a life-threatening situation. A respectable spare tire or mild love handle may actually be a protective factor.

Inevitably, medical puritans came out of the woodwork yelling that we can’t afford to be complacent about the epidemic of obesity. One of them pointed to a study of nurses, which indicated that death happened earlier in overweight women, although this particular study looked only at white women and operated from a different statistical base to the newer, bigger study. They also said that while being overweight might not kill you, it was likely to sicken you.

That last warning was then questioned by a report last Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which says that because of improved medication, high blood pressure and high cholesterol are less prevalent than they were a few decades ago: ergo the health risks are going down as well as the death risks.

The situation, in short, is nuanced. Not a happy option for black-and-white, do-what-I-say-or-die-roaring health promoters. Much the same happened when studies showed obsessive avoidance of the sun was causing shortfalls in a vital vitamin delivered by sunshine.

The researchers were almost accused of urging the innocent gormless public to lie out in the tropical noonday sun all day every day without Sun Factor Anything in order to get melanoma.

The fact is that the general public don’t have to be presented with simplistic ultimatums. They’re good with nuance. Parents these days find a healthy middle way to protect their children from sunburn while allowing them to achieve a gentle tan.

The current hysteria about fatness, however, is just plain daft.

Complacency on obesity? Fat chance.

For starters, mass media hates fat. Popular celeb/lifestyle magazines constantly condemn it. Visibly gaining a few pounds (unless justified by pregnancy) puts the famous on the front pages with captions about “Porking Up” whereas losing weight puts them on the road to sainthood.

A sure way to attract reader attention is the photograph showing how fat Miss X used to be (shock, horror) beside a photograph of how thin she is now (shock and awe). That shot of Mr or Miss X standing inside their old, oversized jeans, pulling out the waistband to show how much space they’ve created for themselves never goes out of fashion. Complacency about fat, against that background, is unlikely.

Indeed, it’s quite difficult to find a fat person who is complacent about it. Mortified and humiliated is much more likely, with strands, now and then, of defiance or self-deprecatory humour. But not a lot of the latter.

Humour’s hard to drum up when all around you is the evidence that society despises you.

That evidence is personal, as well as media-driven. The fact that health issues are involved allows others to be amazingly intrusive with overweight people: it’s OK to insult them for their own good.

It’s particularly acceptable to insult them retrospectively.

Anyone losing weight will testify to the number of people who tell you they’re glad to see you showing responsibility to your children, relieved that you now realise how far you’d let yourself go, and hope you won’t backslide.

THIS self-righteous harassment masquerading as health promotion doesn’t happen in other areas of life. Cigarette-smoking has morphed into an unfortunate affliction caused by evil tobacco-peddlers, requiring help-lines, patches, counselling and sympathy. Alcohol abuse requires the creation of a cafe-bar culture. But fatness is seen as the individual’s own disgusting fault. Have they no shame? (The answer is that most of them have so much shame, it overflows and leaves them standing in the slop, but shame hasn’t a great track record as an appetite-depressant. Rather the reverse).

Obesity is arguably MORE a creation of societal circumstances than alcohol abuse. Individuals forced to commute for more than an hour are much more likely to pick up fast food than embark on the creation of nutritious low-calorie meals when they eventually get home.

Poorer people are even more prone to this tendency, because, as George Orwell observed in the 30s, poor people want tasty food, not nutritious food. But tasty high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt foods are just part of the problem.

Any government considering slapping a levy on cooking oil might more usefully look at slapping a levy on TV, since obesity eerily correlates with the rise and rise of TV viewing. The more you watch TV, the fatter you’re probably going to be. The younger you are when you develop the TV-and-snacks habit, the better your chances of being overweight throughout your life.

Nor is the answer a lurch towards exercise as the sole solution. There’s a lot to be said for exercise. There’s a lot to be said against it, too.

Show me someone with a gammy knee, a frozen shoulder, a bad back, someone who can’t go for a walk or a run unless held together with black elastic bandages, someone who gets through the first couple of hours of each day tottering like someone 20 years older, and I’ll show you someone seriously committed to exercise.

The truly annoying thing about all this is that our mothers may be proven right: when they were banging on about the importance of moderation in all things. As Dean Martin/Westlife would say, Ain’t that a kick in the head?