The New Generation Society

William Clarke

Is Britain in the grips of an obesity epidemic or is it just another scapegoat for deeper problems with the NHS? William Clarke, English student at York University, looks at the prejudices facing the clinically obese.

Is Britain in the grips of an obesity epidemic or is it just another scapegoat for deeper problems with the NHS? William Clarke, English student at York University, looks at the prejudices facing the clinically obese.

‘Britain is in the grips of an obesity epidemic’ scream the newspaper headlines, clearly written by people who are ignorant of either the meaning of ‘obesity’ or the meaning of ‘epidemic’. This language sets the tone of the debate, and the implication is clear: obesity is highly infectious, and fear is a justifiable response. The same failure of logic, which leads people to fret about Britain having the highest rate of teenage pregnancies, makes them think that the average weight of the nation in which they live has somehow got something to do with them. As far as I can gather the train of reasoning runs thus: ‘I am living in the UK. People in the UK are on average fatter than those in other European states. Fatness causes health problems. Therefore, I am risk of health problems because of the fatness of my country’. A few years I saw a television drama set in the dystopian near future where some vast percentage of the country was clinically obese. The message was clear. The Fat are coming for you. They will live in your houses, and eat intemperately from the fridge. The future belongs to Them. Being fat is not infectious, and the dangers of obesity to society are grossly misunderstood.

Up until the early part of the twentieth century women who had children out of wedlock could be diagnosed as ‘moral idiots’ and committed to a mental institution. How long until the obese are diagnosed as ‘nutritional idiots’ and sent to health farms, where ‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith can make scathing remarks about their bowel movements and their worth as human beings? As with everyone who violates the tenants of the social order, the Fat can be denied their rights with impunity. Consider the suggestions that patients should be refused treatment on the NHS if they do not attempt to lose weight. Corner any dinner party body fascist on what really drives their virulent chubby-chastising and they will usually fall back on ‘I don’t want my taxes to pay for them. Fat people cost the NHS more.’ There are two ways to respond to this claim. Firstly, they don’t. Secondly, it shouldn’t matter if they did.

The idea that the Fat are likely to cost the NHS more money than the slim is based on faulty reasoning. Do we really think that if we are not fat we will never get ill? It is true that we may get ill rather later in life, and suffer from different things, but the wages of longevity are decrepitude, and why should we execrate the forty year old diabetic while tolerating the hundred and ten year old widow whose selfishly healthy lifestyle has reduced her to a state where she requires constant medical care in an expensive nursing home? The obese most often die of heart disease, particularly coronaries, which carry them off swiftly in their own homes, a much cheaper way of shuffling off this mortal coil than, say, pneumonia. Even if the average obese person does cost the medical service a little more in his or her lifetime, the harsh reality is that an earlier death eliminates any further costs.

However, even if it could be proven that the Fat did cost us honest hardworking slim people our tax dollars, would we be justified in forcing them to lose weight? Lots of illness is in some way caused by the decisions of the sufferer. Should we make stressed businessmen take compulsory rest cures, or refuse treatments to those with sporting injuries? What about all those miners with their lung problems, they could surely have found other jobs? The moment the NHS becomes an excuse for the enforced modification of behaviour that is the time that we must pack it up. Why should the obese have to pay taxes if they will not be granted public services?

Of course there is more to the obesity panic than just health. When it is suggested that junk food be taxed, very few are planning to raise a levy on spaghetti carbonara or casoulet. Junk food is cheap food, deep fried, American, unorganic and popular with the ‘proles’. The real danger of the ‘obesity epidemic’ lies not in the infectious nature of obesity, but with its perpetuation of an archaic class system. The archetypal image of the Fat is not Nicholas Soames; it’s a greasy ‘chav’ with his chubby hands in a bucket of KFC. The notion of obesity plays off the Victorian stereotypes of the working classes; that they are greedy, lazy and physically unlovely. It was recently discovered, and reported with evident surprise, that the social background of a child played no part in their weight. News just in, the average intelligence of women is the same as men and not all teenagers are drug addicts.

Eighteenth century moralisers worried about gin and Papism, in the nineteenth century it was anarchists and the sexually incontinent. Today we fear convenience foods, cigarettes and alcopops but the implication is the same. There are currents in society, which threaten to undermine public morality, and by extension our own virtue and good standing. However, though we may fear them the reality is that we use these media bogeys to explain away the failures of our own society. Gin was blamed for poverty of eighteenth century London, lasciviousness for the rampant prostitution of the Victorian era, and the ‘obesity epidemic’ excuses us for our inability to provide healthcare for the citizens of Britain.