AS a species, you know you areriding high when the biggest threat to your health comes from some informed overindulgence.
You also know you're more selfish than smart when you blame others for voluntary and informed mistakes that you choose to make. Welcome to Australia 2006.
It is time that as a community we stopped whingeing about the obesity epidemic and started accepting a few home-cooked truths about ourselves.
We should be rejoicing in the fact that our insatiable appetite for fast food is becoming the biggest heath epidemic of our time.
It could be a tad worse. As we are piling on the kilos, more than 30,000 people are dying of starvation or readily preventable illness each day in Africa.
This is despite the fact that there is enough grain alone produced to make every person in the world fat. Better our way than theirs.
Despite this, hardly a week goes by when medical, social science or economic gurus don't roll out some alarmist statistic about how fat we are getting.
The most recent anti-contribution to the "crisis'' came this week from Access Economics, which said the health costs of obesity last year were $3.8 billion and the costs associated with lost productivity and wellbeing were a further $17.2 billion.
Good for us - that's what we've chosen.
The obesity epidemic has been big news for over a decade now.
Diet books have dominated the bestseller list and the weight loss industry has grown exponentially during this time.
During the same period we have continued to get progressively fatter.
We're gluttons. We prefer short-term pleasures to long-term health benefits.
We prefer to a live a slightly shorter, indulgent lifestyle than a robotic, disciplined constant grind.
This is a perspective that is lost on the do-gooder, paternalistic, self-proclaimed lifestyle gurus who keep trying to stuff obesity statistics down our throats.
The expanding nature of our waistline is one health problem that we don't need to be constantly lectured about.
One difference between obesity ill-health and other forms of self-indulgent health problems is that it is a problem for which we assume almost total responsibility.
So does this mean no interventions are appropriate in response to our fat binge? Not quite, but they should be measured.
There are certain foods that are significantly richer in calories than others. This is not always self-evident.
The appropriate regulatory response is to require fast-food companies to provide nutritional information on their products.
Once reforms like this are introduced, we have ourselves to blame if our waistlines continue to bulge.
*Dr Mirko Bagaric is the author of It's a Matter of Opinion: An Analysis of the Defining Issues of Our Time.
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