Obesity is not our fault any more -- really

A news headline on BBC‘s daily newsletter practically jumped off the page at me. It says: “Obesity ‘not individuals’ fault’”. And it continues with the first paragraph stating that individuals can no longer be held responsible for obesity. Furthermore, it is now up to the UK government to act and do something about this. What?

What is even more amazing is the fact that the report, apparently the largest UK study yet in this field, was backed by the government and undertaken by 250 experts, and its recommended course of action is that the state is required to take dramatic and comprehensive action to stop obesity.

One would find it hard to disagree that obesity contributes vastly in terms of costs to the public health system. It is fairly logical that huge amounts of excess weight would burden the body and lead to some breakdown in health. The body is not designed to cope with additional 30kg or 40kg of fat above one’s recommended weight.

The point that the report seems to be making, and which is bizarre if one really looks at it, is that individuals who are overweight need no longer feel responsible about their weight. The government is responsible for people being obese. The vision that flits through one’s mind is a government official tasked with the job of force-feeding UK citizens in order to make them obese.

Of course, rather than that, the report would have advised that the government needs to spend time, effort and naturally taxpayers’ money in order to educate the UK population on the strain that excess weight puts on the body. Even this slightly more benign interpretation of the bizarre headline still leaves questions in one’s mind on what the British citizens expect of their government.

Surely it is the responsibility of each individual to look after his or her own health? It could hardly take vast quantities of knowledge and intelligence to draw the conclusion that being excessively overweight is not good for the body. A small test would suffice. Carry a 20kg backpack up even a gentle hill and see what that does to you. Now imagine that you carry that additional weight around with you all the time. A no-brainer, one would imagine!

Taking the concept of responsibility then one step further, if the citizens of the UK now abdicate their responsibility for the size of their bodies to the government, then surely they cannot complain if they are, for instance, told what they may or may not eat. They might be required to go in to be weighed at clinics and given diet sheets. They could be chastised if the scale climbs over a certain amount.

One could then take it further and prohibit obese people from buying certain foods, take away their health benefits, deny them the use of public transport and insist on walking as enforced exercise. Obese people would not be allowed access to government places such as museums and myriad other penalties and forms of deterrents to overeating.

One could imagine the uproar about the infringement on human rights that would echo as far as Asia, no doubt. What it does, though, is lead one to consider the universal question of responsibility. One cannot expect to abdicate responsibility and still retain freedom to act as one wants.

It is the same principle with regards to public safety. The government has been given the responsibility to ensure the safety of its citizens. In order to do the job and enforce law and order, the police in the UK have erected CCTV cameras in every nook and cranny. The citizens are unable to handle the responsibility of not harming another person and the result is that the authority has to watch everybody. No more privacy!

It’s the same regarding employment. The government, and not only in the UK, has been made responsible for ensuring employment for all its citizens. Yet at the same time, people still want to be able to choose the jobs they are prepared to take.

Demands such as “you’ve got to give me a job”, “you’ve got to make sure I am safe” and, most bizarrely, “you’ve got to stop me from getting obese” are made the responsibility of the government. Somewhere along the way, the citizens have slowly but surely abdicated their responsibility for their own lives, expecting “others” to take over.

The communists tried that, didn’t they? It wasn’t that successful, one may recall. Besides that, the non-communist countries spent an inordinate amount of time and effort ridiculing the communist principles and feeling sorry for the citizens subjected to those regimes. Of course the UK is not heading towards becoming a communist regime, one hopes. But it is quite worrying when headlines such as the one under discussion infer that the government has to take on the responsibility to keep its citizens thin!