Rob Lyons: Politicians should eat their words in the obesity debate

The nation, apparently, must consume five billion fewer calories per day. The chief medical officer for England, Professor Sally Davies, said: “Being overweight or obese is a direct consequence of eating more calories than we need”, adding: “Obesity is a leading cause of serious diseases such as type-2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer.”

This is frightening stuff, but it’s worth taking these scare stories with a pinch of salt.

I would argue that the obesity panic is greatly exaggerated, that the “cure” for it doesn’t work, and that it usually gets promoted by politicians who have no better way to justify their existence.

For starters, obesity rates have stopped rising for adults, and are actually falling for children. The latest figures from the Health Survey for England, the best source of information we have, show that in 2009, 22.1 per cent of men were obese – compared to 24.1 per cent in 2008; for women, the new figure was 23.9 per cent, as against 24.9 per cent in 2008.

In 2004, 19.4 per cent of boys aged two to 15 were regarded as obese; in 2009, that figure was down to 16.1 per cent. The equivalent figures for girls were 18.5 per cent (2004) and 15.3 per cent (2009).

Even then, what the medical profession regards as obesity and what we commonly recognise as obesity are two different things. About one in four adults is classed as obese.

Now, think about your workmates and friends. Would you really regard a quarter of them as obese? I’ll bet few of them match up to the typical picture that accompanies every story about obesity: a morbidly obese person, whose clothes are straining to hold in their tummies. Such very overweight people only make up about two per cent of the population.

In truth, distinctions between normal weight, overweight and obesity are pretty arbitrary lines, based on something called body mass index (BMI) – that’s your weight in kilos divided the square of your height in metres. BMI is not a particularly good predictor of health, except at the extremes. Those who are mildly obese have much the same life expectancy and health outcomes as those who are normal weight. Being a little underweight is almost certainly worse for you than being mildly obese.

Most of the people currently described as obese will live roughly as long on average as everyone else, and will end up dying of much the same diseases of old age as everyone else: heart disease, strokes and cancer. In fact, life expectancies have been rising for decades and will continue to rise despite all the fuss about our ample bellies.

Here’s a contradiction to keep in mind: we’re often told that we’re all going to die younger because of obesity, but we’re also told that the country will be bankrupt in a few decades because of the ever-increasing number of old people. Can we really have an “obesity timebomb” and a “pensions timebomb” simultaneously? I suspect that neither of these scare stories will prove to be true.

There are clearly health problems associated with being very fat or very thin. If nothing else, being unable to keep control of your weight is simply depressing.

But if dieting and exercise really could cure obesity in the long term, don’t you think people would do it?

There are endless ways in our society in which being thin is validated and being fat is viewed negatively, whether it is in terms of health, sex appeal or the supposed strain it puts on NHS resources.

While many fat people rightly refuse to accept the abusive labels and moralistic comments directed at them, I’m sure most would rather be slimmer. If the usual advice to eat less and exercise more really worked in the long term to solve the problem, most of those who are very overweight would have slimmed down years ago and the dieting industry – which thrives off our desperation to be thinner – would have disappeared.

Rather than giving us endless lectures about our diets, a more humane approach would be to figure out why some of us pile on the pounds and others stay slim in a way that doesn’t simply fill in the gap where the explanation should be with a sermon.

That way, those who really struggle with their weight would get the help they need – and the rest of us could enjoy our food in peace.

• Rob Lyons is author of Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder, published by Imprint Academic.