Obesity: blame the car, not junk food

FOLLOWING sustained attack by the media on ‘junk food’ as the root cause of obesity, proposals are afoot to restrict the advertising of it on TV, or even to introduce a junk food tax.

Yet again the media has created a myth — and a scapegoat.

People have always eaten ‘junk food’, albeit of a different type — cakes, stodgy puddings, white bread with butter, jam or dripping, huge lumps of fatty meat and ladles of sugar in tea.

But obesity is a recent phenomenon — most adults today are over-fat and about a one-third are clinically obese. Childhood obesity is rising exponentially.

Anyone who is old, or who has seen old films, should have noticed how few fat people there were in the past. This was because everyone was more active; men did physical jobs, women did housework manually, children played outside in the street, and everyone walked a lot.

Today, we spend our lives sitting in cars, or in front of desks, computers and televisions. If you consume more calories than you burn, you get fat — it is as simple as that.

Nowadays, people have no need to take exercise, and they are neither encouraged nor provided with the facilities to do so by the Government.

Far worse, they are prevented from walking or cycling because of traffic danger. Planners and road engineers ignore the needs of cyclists or pedestrians. We are forced to drive everywhere.

If the Government was serious about tackling obesity, it should ban advertising of cars, not junk food. Just as the banning of cigarette advertising has changed the image of the smoker from a suave romantic to a squalid drug-addict, so a ban on car advertising might allow us to wise up to the effects of our addiction to cars, including obesity.

Michael Job

Rossnagreana

Glengarriff

Co Cork