Britain launches a drive to slim down amid growing fears of 'obesity epidemic'
By DOUG SAUNDERS
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
London � Until recently, the most prominent symbol of British-U.S. solidarity was a rifle-toting soldier stationed in Iraq. Now it is being replaced by a gargantuan, 84-pound toddler choking on her own blubber.
The American obsession with fat and weight became so acute this year that both congressional leaders and Wall Street's biggest corporations declared it a national crisis. And it abruptly crossed the ocean this week as the War on Obesity threatened to replace the War on Terrorism as Britain's favoured political preoccupation.
After a government report revealed that Britons are becoming increasingly overweight, the "obesity epidemic" has prompted parliamentary debates, government calls for bans on junk-food advertising and warning labels on fatty food, statements from Prime Minister Tony Blair calling for a thinner nation, apologies from potato-chip makers and sensational tabloid reports, such as "Fat & Dead . . . at 3."
That headline, in The Sun, referred to the fat panic's poster child: a three-year-old believed to have died in an East London hospital this year, her heart stopping as her weight reached 84 pounds.
British MPs were told about the case by the head of an obesity clinic who also said she had seen several cases of children "choking on their own fat."
The report on obesity, authored by a committee of MPs and supported by extensive research, likened the growing girth of Britons, now the fattest people on average in Europe, with a major disease outbreak. "With quite astonishing rapidity, an epidemic of obesity has swept over England. . . . Obesity will soon surpass smoking as the greatest cause of premature loss of life. It will entail levels of sickness that will put enormous strains on the health service."
It has shocked a country where snacks are a cultural touchstone and even the smallest corner shop sells a dozen flavours of potato chips. Only two years ago, senior cabinet ministers declared war on the epidemic of skinniness, condemning the anorexia and bulimia that were emaciating teenaged girls. But now, in the new spirit of transatlantic co-operation, the American penchant for eating fat has caught the public imagination.
Stories continue to rise to the surface. On Tuesday, a new poll revealed that a third of Britons are too lazy to take a 10-minute walk, while Oxfam condemned the "fat divide": One in four people in England is obese while half of all Ethiopians remain malnourished. Ed Cairns, the charity's policy director, complained that the English spend enough on snacks each year to fund primary education for every child in the world three times over.
Tuesday also brought the first all-out retreat in this war. The advertisers of Walkers Wotsits, a brand of potato chip aimed at children under 12, apologized for considering a campaign that would have declared: "Wotsits are for me. I'm going to buy them when I get the chance and pester Mum for them when she is shopping."
Comparisons between the Iraq war and the crackdown on chubbiness have been hard to avoid: Both were made in America and eagerly picked up in Britain, both feature Tony Blair as a central character and both have deeply divided the British public.
An editorial Tuesday in The Independent, a left-leaning daily, used the name of a U.S. soldier at the centre of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal to declare that a balance must be struck "between the snobbish tendency to regard McDonald's as the Lynndie England of the food industry and the idea that the free market will enable us all to find our own instant happiness."
Other writers drew more direct links between the American influence and Britain's increasingly bulky population.
"It is inequality and disrespect that makes people fat," columnist Polly Toynbee declared in The Guardian. ". . . America has by far the most unequal society and by far the fattest. Britain and Australia come next." (Others later noted that the United States is neither the most unequal country nor the most fat.)
And as with the Iraq war, Tony Blair now appears to be wishing he hadn't got involved in this one. Although he initially endorsed the study and his ministers supported calls for strong government action, including colour-coded markers on food packages resembling U.S. terror-alert warnings, he appeared to back away Tuesday.
"I am responsible for many things, but I can't make people slimmer," he told a breakfast television show.
FAT OF THE LANDS
Obesity rates (percentage of population) among adults from selected OECD countries for 2000.
U.S.: 30.9%
Britain: 22%
Australia: 20.8%
Canada: 14.9%
Spain: 12.6%
France: 9%
Italy: 8.6%
Japan: 3.2%
The OECD believes the data for the U.S., Britain and Australia are more reliable than those from other countries because they are based on health examinations. Other countries rely on health interviews.
SOURCE: ORGANIZATION FOR ECONOMIC CO-OPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT