Two thirds of Americans are overweight. The World Health Organisation estimates that by 2030 half of all Americans will be obese.
These are dizzying trends, and the Western world’s physical and fiscal well-being depends on reversing them. The overspent american health care systems face being inundated with fat-related heart attacks, diabetes and strokes that we already can’t afford. This generation of Americans may well be the first to have a lower life expectancy than their parents.
Obesity is a creeping menace, and it never seems to have its game-changing moment. Food company promoters have spent $175m on lobbying since Barack Obama took office in 2008. Their “successes” include diluting efforts to change US school menus.
Food manufacturers on both sides of the Atlantic speak earnestly of “self-regulation” but it hasn’t worked.
Every American restaurant, without fail, has the same three or four items on its kids’ menu: grilled cheese (cheese on toast), three-cheese pizza, cheeseburgers and fries, and chicken tenders. It doesn’t seem to enter anyone’s head that children should eat anything else, or ever want to. We talk grandly about exercising personal choice, but increasingly children are given nothing to choose from.
The “exercise personal choice” and “let the food industry self-regulate” line of thinking demonstrably hasn’t worked. It has taken us to the point where, in less than 20 years, half of all Americans will be obese. And Britain is not as far behind the US as you might think – 25 per cent of women and 24 per cent of men are already in that category.
It is surely time to try something different. Fat needs to be seen clearly for what it is – an increasingly existential issue for our children and our societies. In combating the scourge, we must take nothing off the table – legislation included.
