Where is the information and action to fight the obesity epidemic?

To listen to the World Health Organisation, you would think that Ireland was going to sink into the sea by the year 2030, under the sheer weight of its growing population of fatties. Allowing for a degree of hyperbole, though, the rich-world epidemic of obesity is real, in the sense that it is upon us already, and far from a laughing matter. In this country it will add to the already inexorable demands on the NHS from a population living longer, or rather living longer in poorer health, kept going by astonishingly effective – and expensive – new treatments for the ills of modern life, including cholesterol-clogged arteries and type 2 diabetes. Fully one-third of British women are forecast to be obese in 2030, compared with about one-quarter now. At the same time, paradoxically, anorexia and bulimia are running at historically high levels. Food seems to have become more of a pain than a pleasure for us, life-threatening, not life-enhancing.

Apart from cutting back on the doughnuts and chips, what is to be done? Well, that would be a start, but as every yo-yo dieter can attest, willpower alone is rarely enough to fight the flab and the attractions – hard-wired by evolution into our brains – of fatty, sugary treats. Better packaging would be a start, with a compulsory element to the present “traffic light” system for indicating levels of fats, salt and sugars, especially in processed food. We could go further, too, as we have with tobacco, and frighten consumers into thinking twice about single-handedly tackling a family bag of crisps or six-pack of muffins. Or both. “Muffins Can Kill” may sound a comical sort of heath warning, but consumers do need to think twice about what they are doing to themselves and, so far as it costs us all to repair the resulting coronary and dental damage on the NHS, the rest of society. Information, then, sometimes necessarily displayed with a graphic edge to it, is essential for consumers to make informed choices. There is still too little of it. We seem to be caught in a society where the advertising and fashion industries insist on aggressively pushing images of perfect “beach bodies”, while the food industry and the supermarkets dream up ever more tempting ways for us to eat concoctions of sugar and fat that make us ashamed to put a bikini on.

Taxing sugar, a solution often suggested, is problematic, as it would suffer from all manner of practical obstacles. After all, your “five a day” fruit contains a good deal of natural sugars, and it is extremely difficult to construct even the most cranky diet to be entirely sugar free. In reality, a tax on sugar would be, as with any tax on food, a tax that would fall disproportionately on the poor, and would not necessarily change their eating habits. Where sugar has become an addiction, this is especially true.

Given the vast expenditures on food preparation, marketing and delivery, it is strange that so little is spent on educating children about their diet, and, even after Jamie Oliver’s efforts, so few schools set an example of providing wholesome and tasty food in place of that notorious turkey twizzler. There is also a problem with many food campaigners, in that they refuse to accept that, to many people of all ages, a McDonald’s or indeed a turkey twizzler is more delicious than some grated carrot. Realising why the fast-food industry is so successful at producing palatable food cheaply is half the battle.

So, in such an intimate, personal sphere as what we eat and how we eat it, it will be difficult to reverse the fattening trend. Information about food, education about what it can do to us, voluntary action by food companies and retailers on food packaging, portions and positioning (such as the location of choccy bars next to tills to encourage an impulse buy) will all help. Taxation and bans will probably, in due course, be tried, but with perverse and unintended effects, especially on poorer families, who will not automatically replace packs of dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets with a nice fresh raw corn-fed organic bird. Fat is a formidable foe.