The National Obesity Forum produced figures this week that suggested the previously forecasted 50% of adults that would be obese by 2050 had become – pardon the pun – somewhat bloated.
Around half this number already qualify as obese as of today, which will not surprise many; the only way is up here.
Obesity costs the NHS billions annually with estimates varying around the £5bn mark, enough to keep Tony Blair in public speaking engagements for a similar period.
There is a strong argument that obesity could overtake alcohol and tobacco as public health enemy number one and yet few seem to have any idea how to arrest this tide of blubber.
As usual it’s all the fault of successive Governments; after all, they have mucked everything else up. So we look blindly to politicians to control yet another part of our daily lives.
That Government can hope to control how much junk we eat is ludicrous. Taxing chocolate, banning sugar or hiking the price of burgers will barely make a dint in the problem.
People are stupid – thick in the head and thick around the waist – and no amount of tax will cure this. The real issue is that so few of us actually move anymore, beginning from cradle and extending to grave.
Hard manual labour vanished generations ago for many around about the same time that those in power decided that getting cold and muddy on a sports field was not fair and that we could sell the fields and stick houses on them.
We freed beagles from being strapped in testing killer cigarettes all day and swapped our kids, plugging them into a lifetime of crack Google addiction and a slow regression to obesity and social retard status.
Most kids grow up largely inactive, denied the joy of exercise, travelling seamlessly from infanthood to teenage years, exchanging the dummy for the iPad; the modern parent knows that Google is simply a replacement for Calpol.
Society considers itself advanced but the real remedies here require a step back in time.
We need to teach our kids about food and how to cook without having to rely on the frozen aisle. This is largely because we will leave them with no money in the future to shop with, so they will have to hunt pensioners and learn how to cook them.
As Cameron has ensured the pensioners will be the only ones with any money at all with his bribe, sorry promise, of protected pensions, they will make a good kill and have lots of healthy lean meat on their well-fed bodies.
Kids will need to get out playing and foraging again, enjoying climbing trees and falling out of them, preferably on top of a pensioner.
They need to learn to enjoy sport as running fast after robbing a pensioner will be useful, not that there will be any policemen slim enough to chase them.
Perhaps the saddest conclusion anyone can draw from this ugly and unstoppable trend is that people have simply lost pride in themselves.
Why You Should Not Drive Whilst Listening to a Radio Phone In
Anybody with half a brain or is not delusional – which rules out Ed Balls – knows the country is broke but a phone-in this week demonstrated just why politicians, like bankers, simply don’t get it.
The debate was whether we should continue the practice of commissioning portraits of our leaders – costing thousands – so that people in generations to come could see who really screwed it up for them.
As an example they have blown £37,000 on a portrait of John Bercow, MP, House of Commons Speaker and famous only for having a nutter as a wife. Why paint him and surely if you had to it would be a miniature?
The counter argument was why not simply post a “selfie” to which some MP – I had to turn off or plunge the car into a tree – argued that it was the “relationship” between the artist and subject that was of real value here.
What about the relationship between local people and a library? This may be small beer in the context of a country that owes over £1.2 trillion and is adding another £100 billion each year but you get my drift?
Gluttony Returns
It’s reward time for the Masters of the Universe again after another successful year of rigging markets, shafting customers and crap service.
The RBS board must have been smoking some of the Rev Flowers “special” Co-Op cigars in seeking bonuses up to twice salaries for the chosen few. It’s staggering in it’s arrogance and ignorance in times when families struggle to exist.
There is a book written in the aftermath of the global crash about the might of the US banks in particular; called Too Big To Fail in the case of the likes of RBS this could be construed as too big to give a stuff.
All the usual arguments will be trotted out about having to pay for the best talent but RBS, in investment banking terms, is more Conference League North than Champions League.
And you cannot keep rubbing ordinary people’s noses in it with these obscene inequalities driven by sheer greed; sooner or later something will break.
Yes, those that genuinely create wealth should be rewarded and equally, you cannot run a state on limitless handouts and a bloated welfare state.
Expect Cameron and Osborne to huff, puff and do absolutely nothing whilst Miliband continues to fail to remember that it was his lot that created this mess.
Grin And Bear It
I made a painful mistake in my rush to grab a place on the Desperate Housewives’ spinning class this week as the queue was like the New Year’s sales with the advent of long awaited new bikes.
Sadly, when I got there all but a few of the old wooden wheeled ones were left. It was another day riding like Fred Flinstone.
In my haste I had thrown my tackle in my bag a little too quickly. All the old bikes were sat on the new bikes, jaw-jawing as I scurried into the class. Too late!
As soon as I mounted the nearest old bike I could find, a throbbing started pulsing in my shorts; surely not…something needed rearranging.Surrounded by thirty women, this was not an option as I may have been lynched.
In a week with DLT, Ken Barlow and Rolf Harris in the dock, I had no desire to follow for flashing amongst a sea of old birds. So for forty-five minutes I sat there as the pain grew and my little button became a trapped and bruised porcini.
I prayed for hill climbs so I could get out of the saddle, shake a little rumba-rumba – they keep saying “get to the beat” – and hoped the lycra suffocation ceased.
To no avail as I limped away to find the ice bucket.
There was a lesson here; never mount an old bike in haste especially without the comfort of a broad saddle. Never again shall I take such liberties with my tackle especially when astride an old bike.
RIP Trigger
All of us know a Trigger so the sad passing of Roger Lloyd-Pack this week – Trigger – is particularly poignant. Go easy on your local Trigger tonight…they make us all feel just that bit better than we should.
The Nightmare of All Tours
On a day when England contrived to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory at the Gabba in the second one day international, perhaps time to reflect on a tour so bad you would think Del Boy and Trigger had organised, it not the English Cricket Board.
This week a third player left ahead of schedule; Steven Finn, until recently our great fast bowling hope, was sent home deemed “unselectable”. Given England’s performances on tour they might have flown the lot back.
It made me wonder to the forthcoming new season when clubs up and down the country emerge from a cold dark winter to see who can still fit in their “whites” and who has not passed away to the great pavilion in the sky.
Nobody is ever “unselectable” come Saturday – a pulse rate qualifies you for selection these days – but many come close and I look forward to the new and wondrous sights the strange, untested world of the Stiffs’ dressing room will present in my dotage.
Roll on Skipton away and favourite to be the first player deemed “unselectable” is Molly, unable to resist some of the finest teas in the league, crumbling in the face of a sponge cake onslaught.
Unselectable…never!
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