There has always been fat people around hasn’t there? If they were children they got verbally teased by their fellow pupils. If they were adults they were silently pitied. But they were certainly ‘noticed’. Why was that? It was because there were so few of them, that’s why.

These days in Britain you can’t go about your normal day to day business without coming across many, not fat but ‘obese’ people – the most worrying thing is that they are not just adults, but whole families including children and babies indeed.

It gets scientific and confusing because they keep talking about ‘body mass index’ – really it is all about being really ‘FAT and you only need eyes to see that not a bloody index do you? Worse than other comparable countries, more than a quarter of us Brits are obese and another same amount are overweight these days – how worrying is that?

Obesity probably contributes to all the top common cancers, so we get a dozen thousand cases EVERY year in the UK and this WILL rise by a quarter as much again annually as we go on. That’s not very clever is it?

What the hell is happening here? Well, what is happening is that those people are eating too much food. Sounds obvious yes, but why is that then? There are a lot of reasons – none of them complex!

It starts with the obvious fact that there is too much food around in Western societies. While large parts of the World’s population face death by starvation, we here face the opposite – death by too much food. Already billions of people are facing illness and death in the World because of overeating – so it is a worldwide issue.

This is compounded by the explosion of manufactured ‘convenience’ foods, snacks & drinks, and the laziness of a population that won’t shop sensibly, can’t evaluate food, and certainly can’t be bothered to cook. We have begat a new generation of men & women that stuff their faces with all manner of food from all around the World, without ANY idea of how much energy (calories!) it provides, what is a sensible safe portion or frequency, or if it can damage their health long term.

In England obesity is part of the North South divide – it gets worse as you head up.

Animals eat things that provide energy, but all digestive systems are quite different in species, so while cows make a fantastic meal of grass, we humans can’t even get a few categories out of it. While rabbits thrive & grow well on lettuce, we men & women eat it on a diet to fill our stomachs and take in a tiny amount of calories. Different people also process food differently, differently ‘efficiency’ if you like – two people can eat the same quantity of the same food at the same time, and one is fat as a pig and the other is as skinny as a rake! Not fair that, but a fact of life isn’t it? That is NO EXCUSE for the ‘efficient’ food processors to eat too much food for their needs is it?

Physical activity requires the energy provided by food. In long past decades both men & women’s lives involved a great deal physical activity & effort – like manual work, washing, soil tilling, cooking, walking miles, and all else. Children spent their lives out of doors, involved in physical games, and again walking miles everywhere. All of that required energy – often meaning a quantity of food that wasn’t available & wasn’t affordable (result illness & death). The pendulum has swung completely the other way now though hasn’t it? People both eat far too much for their needs, do less physical work, and exercise too little to keep their bodies fit (or even use up excessive energy intake).

When people eat out here it is a treat, an infrequent experience indeed, because they then ‘expect’ to eat gluttonous quantities of food, & drink unnecessarily large quantities of alcohol, or substitute that with dangerous concoctions of ‘soft’ drinks containing bags of sugar! That is why it is so expensive an experience in the UK. You eat (safely), off say a street barrow in Jakarta Indonesia and you will enjoy a nourishing tasty fried rice or spicy satay – but the meat content will be minimal & you’ll get an egg if you are lucky, furthermore the food will be cheap! [You don’t see many obese people in those kind of countries do you?]. Here you eat costly in a smart food chain’s place (so called restaurant), where the food is all trucked-in as mass produced processed garbage that will kill you in the end perhaps?

Is obesity an illness? Most certainly! Is it catching? Most certainly it is, but not in the medical sense of being transmitted by simple direct germ or virus contact. So where the hell did we get it from in Britain? Where we get most things from, good & bad, – from America of course! If you have ever been lucky enough to visit the USA you’ll have enjoyed an amazing experience no doubt, and probably seen some marvellous sights along the way; but burnt into your memory will have been two things – how much they serve in food places for customers to actually eat, and how obese so many people are.

In Britain obese people are swamping our medical resources (because they are regularly ill for the simple reason that their bodies can’t cope); dragging down our economy (because they aren’t capable of work, so don’t contribute and often live on benefits); drain on social services (because of physical & social consequences), and have even poor educational levels (because they lack attainment and three in ten have no qualifications).

If that is NOT criminal activity what the heck is?

The worst of it all is the child abuse. Parents who allow their children to become obese. Parents, who in the guise of love , constantly feed their kids junk food & unhealthy drinks, never ensure they get physical exercise, and simply sit them inactive in front of the tele without any regard to their basic health, and watch them get fatter and fatter. We are getting massive increased numbers of our kids needing hospital treatment (including surgery) each year because of weight related medical illnesses (children who risk things like asthma, diabetes, and other breathing problems, and even strokes & heart problems, amongst other worse things) – some five thousand of them. We have the HIGHEST rate of child obesity in Western Europe (some twenty percent, so not a gold medal to be proud of surely?). THE SHIP IS NOT COMING IN – IT HAS DOCKED ALREADY.

If that is NOT criminal activity what the heck is?

Oh yes you do hear of a few cases where the child protection authorities step in, but that is infinitesimal isn’t it? These obese kids (and the potentially obese) should go into care and the parents locked up surely? [Have you directly experienced a case of such ‘child abuse’? Bet there was nothing you could have done about it – no system in place is there?]. Children should be monitored regarding their weight – there is enough opportunity surely? Even at school the kids regularly do PE & Sport and the schools should be recording their age, height & weight; there are enough statistics about here to highlight anything going awry and to trigger a response – a review by the school nurse and referred to the medical or education authorities for example. It’s not rocket science is it?

[Who is doing anything about it? NOBODY!

1. Lets get started, first by making it a ‘Notifiable Disease’
2. Then make it a ‘legal’ requirement to get treatment.
3. Finally to make certain behaviour ‘criminal’ acts (like making children obese)]