There is another pandemic that, in the long run, may be more harmful to the health of humanity than that of COVID-19. It will ultimately cause the loss of many more years of human life, if it does not already do so.
Whether pandemic is quite the right word for it might be disputed. I am referring to the vast increase in obesity in most parts of the world in recent decades. The word pandemic suggests illness, but is obesity in itself an illness? That it causes illness, no one will dispute: but many things cause illnesses without being themselves illnesses.
Increasingly, however, medical journals write of obesity, as they do of addiction, as if it were in the same category as, say, multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s disease, that is to say, an unfortunate mischance. There is now, after all, surgery for obesity that works; drug companies research drugs to reduce obesity from which, if found, they will make fat profits, if I may be allowed a slight pun.
On the other hand, most people think, with varying degrees of reticence to express their thoughts in public, that obesity is the consequence of weakness of will. Greed is not illness but a sin, or at least a moral failure. We are fat because we give into temptation, that which Oscar Wilde said was the only thing that he couldn’t resist.
The British government is thinking of paying people—bribing them, in effect—to buy and eat healthier, less fattening foods. It will reward them financially for their weight loss or for the choices they make in supermarkets. This, of course, flies in the face of the illness concept of obesity: not even a British government would think of paying patients with hypothyroidism to produce more thyroid hormone from their own glands.
There is no doubt that obesity is a problem in Britain, where it is more prevalent than in most countries. This clearly results from the eating habits of the population, now inculcated early in childhood. Not long ago, for example, I witnessed in a baker’s shop in my small town a fat and slatternly mother force a cake on her 3-year-old child, who was slightly overweight but not yet fat.
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