Scolding Santa offers no escape Claus from our epidemic of obesity
DANI GARAVELLI
IT'S hard to take the obesity crisis seriously when the best those on the frontline can do is castigate as a poor role model a fictional character who brings happiness to millions. That's right, last week Santa Claus was told to stop gorging on mince pies lest his legions of adoring fans should see his bulging stomach and chubby cheeks as something to aspire to. I guess his Svengali-like influence over the behaviour of young people explains why so many of them now grow long white beards and keep reindeer as pets.
Ok, so Dr Miles Fisher, a consultant physician at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, made his tongue-in-cheek comments after drugs company Sanofi-Aventis sponsored a poll of Scottish Santas to demonstrate how waistlines are expanding (although it's hardly a representative cross-section since shops aren't likely to employ skinny men for the part). But is this frivolous approach entirely appropriate in a week when the NHS announced it would soon be funding stomach-stapling operations for children and a study published in the British Medical Journal warned obesity could bankrupt the health service if allowed to go unchecked?
In their report, government A&E tsar George Alberti and Glasgow University professor Naveed Sattar point out that obesity treatment already takes up 9% of the NHS budget, but claim this will increase as the number of obese adults rises from one in five to a predicted one in three by 2010. Their research, published in the wake of a recent World Health Organisation warning that in the future 70% of all deaths across the globe will be from obesity-related illnesses, is bleak, creating an image of a health service struggling to cope with an increase in heart disease, cancer, back pain, diabetes and skin problems. But almost as worrying is the way in which the authors inadvertently expose a near-bankruptcy of new ideas on how to tackle the epidemic.
"We need to think out of the box, because nothing that has been looked at so far seems to have worked," says Sattar, an expert in metabolic medicine, before setting out a series of recommendations which do nothing of the sort.
Near the top of their wish list is the introduction of a tax on processed food high in sugar and salt. That sounds eminently sensible. But hasn't the government already tried that with cigarettes and alcohol? And has it stopped people smoking and drinking? No, it has merely bolstered Treasury funds at the expense of the worse-off, who find it more difficult to survive without a little something to relieve the stress of daily living.
Although, arguably, a junk food tax could increase resources to be spent on treating obesity-related diseases, it would do nothing to alter our complex and ambivalent relationship with what we consume. It is the failure to understand this psychological component of obesity that undermines the authors' most contentious proposal: that those buying larger clothes should find them accompanied by a helpline number. Anyone who has ever struggled with their weight knows there is nothing more calculated to make you eat an entire selection box in one sitting than a day spent trying on clothes that don't fit or suit. And that, far from encouraging you to diet, constantly being told you need to lose weight is likely to push you into increasingly self-destructive behaviour.
Looking at yourself in a mirror and realising how fat you've become lowers your self-esteem. To discover the clothes you cannot fit into come complete with a helpline number is hardly likely to put you in the positive frame of mind needed if you are to alter your diet. Instead, it is liable to tip you further into depression: a growing problem which is itself placing a heavy burden on the NHS.
Nor do the experts show any insight into what the well-established links between obesity and deprivation mean in real terms. They recommend tightening up planning regulations so new housing developments would only be allowed if they include plans for a park or sports facility, and new roads if they come with cycle tracks. But what good are cycle tracks if people cannot be persuaded to ride bikes? Or parks, if they are immediately invaded by teenagers who make it their mission to twist the seats of swings over the top of the bars and scrawl graffiti all over the benches?
Have the people who come up with such policies ever considered how difficult it would be to store a cycle on the 15th floor of a block of flats, never mind take it up and down every day, with no guarantee the lift will be working? Have they visited parks strewn with the remnants of last night's drinking and wondered how children could possibly be allowed to run around them?
Even the best-intentioned initiatives to get people fit often fail to take on board the chaos of many ordinary people's lives. In Glasgow, for example, school children are eligible for cheap weekly swimming lessons, but the system for booking and rebooking each new block is so complicated, and those charged with administering it so inflexible, that you have to be highly organised and committed to retain your place. And then there is the difficulty of getting your children to the pools and sports centres on a weekly basis. If I have to summon up all my energy to put my children into the car to drive there, how likely is it that a poor, single mother-of-three will brave relentless rain to take them all on the bus.
The obesity crisis is something we are heading into with our eyes open. There is no lack of political will to tackle it; there isn't even a lack of investment. The problem is the same one that infects so many aspects of social policy: an inability to see the bigger picture. We can rid the world of bad fictional role models, put a tax on chips or turn Britain into one great sporting arena. But unless we start to engage in joined-up thinking and address the larger social issues that combine to create a culture of overeating, the expanding girth of a handful of merry Santa Clauses will be the least of our problems.
Obesity Epidemic 
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