Taxing the fat to pay the thin

So, finally a doctor in the UK has been brave enough to speak out and voice what many people already think  – that instead of pandering to the needs of the morbidly and super morbidly obese with free mobility scooters and Disability Living Allowance, they should be made to contribute towards the massive strain they are placing on the health system, by paying more tax. And in turn, those who work hard to remain fit and healthy should be financially rewarded for their effort.

With obesity related issues draining every last penny out of the already overstretched NHS budget and £6.3 billion being spent fighting fat, this scheme sounds about on the mark to me. No doubt it’ll be met with cries of “You can’t say that”, but it has nothing to do with being judgmental or ‘fattist’, it’s just common sense. As is Dr Chand’s proposal to add tax to the type of fattening food that offers little or no nutritional value, yet guarantees maximum ‘junk in your trunk’.

Such a tax would of course cause outrage amongst the loyal Happy Meal brigade, all of whom would shriek loudly that it’s unfair to target those on lower incomes, who consider fast food a cheaper alternative. Quite frankly, tough. Tobacco and alcohol are already taxed in an effort to target smoking related illnesses and binge drinking, so why shouldn’t unhealthy food be too?

And as for the argument that junk food is the cheaper alternative, what a load of rubbish. It’s the easier alternative. With every supermarket offering cut prices bargains and more BOGOF offers than you can shake a stick at, it’s far cheaper to cook simple healthy food that it is to buy in a round of up-sized burgers, chips and coke. Even if you do have limited funds and an army of hungry mouths at home to feed. People who choose takeaways every night over cooking are just lazy, and parents who feed their kid’s junk for breakfast, lunch and tea should be done for child abuse. (see related post).

Strangely enough, many of these parents who claim they can’t afford to buy healthy food for their kids just so happen to smoke and drink. They think nothing of puffing £5 into thin air or pouring it down their throat, but they can’t stretch the family budget enough to incorporate something that hasn’t been regurgitated out of a deep fat fryer and into a styrofoam box. For £5 you can buy an entire chicken. So do you spend your money on 20 cigarettes, or a whole birds worth of protein to feed the kids? There’s the difficult decision of the week.

The argument that fast food is even fast is the biggest myth of all. At tea time it takes less time to scramble an egg, microwave a potato or even cook some pasta than it does to climb into the car, drive to the nearest nugget dispensing outlet, queue up, order, collect and scoff. Of course most children would probably prefer the nugget option, and as such be more likely to eat it up without a moan or a struggle, but since when was feeding them meant to be about taking the path of least resistance?

Children are just that, children. They should be eating what’s right for them, not what’s easiest for the parent, no matter how much money they have, how brain dead they are in the kitchen or whether by the end of the day they’ve simply lost the will to live. God knows I could well do without the constant battles about how many vegetables are lurking on my kid’s dinner plates, but I’d rather deal with the fuss they sometimes make than watch them both turn into Weebles, and wobble right off their Trip Trap chairs.

So is the idea of taxing the morbidly obese ever going to work? Nope, not a chance in hell. Why? Because many of those who fall into this category probably aren’t able to work in the first place. Their size, and the associated health problems that comes along with it, prevent them from carrying out even the simplest day-to-day tasks, never mind holding down paid employment. So if they were forced to pay more tax, they would no doubt need to be awarded more disability allowance to afford it.

Obesity is a problem that will carry on for many, many years to come. In part this is because many of those individuals who are contributing to the problem, simply refuse to accept any responsibility for their own actions. Instead they prefer to blame the government for its lack of support in helping them to lose weight. They complain about the shortage of free local sports centres and wide open spaces in which to jog. They claim that a bunch of carrots are exorbitantly priced and no one ever taught them how to cook.

In answer to that. It’s not up to the government (who lets face it can’t even run the country properly never mind a weight loss club) to prise the fork out of each and every chubby little hand across the land. There are 1000’s of miles of free pavements in the UK, go walk on them. If you can afford to upsize your £4.50 McDonalds meal you can afford a bunch of carrots. Go buy a cook book, or cheaper still, turn on the TV and listen to Jamie Oliver.

It seems incredible that so many people simply refuse to put two and two together and start addressing the problem, instead of comfort feeding and making it even worse. Even with all the fat fighting campaigns, health lectures and awareness raising TV programmes out there, all trying to ram the obvious message home, it’s hard to see what the solution will be.

Perhaps if those who need to shed the weight actually climbed out of their complimentary buggies and used their feet, they might be surprised to find the weight starting to drop off. Obviously there’s no miracle cure to losing this amount of weight, unless you see stomach stapling as a viable option, but it has been done, and is therefore not impossible.

I’m not even going to pretend to have a clue about the horrible vicious circle of a situation that you’d find yourself in, when you reach this sort of size. Or how demoralising and depressing it  could be to live with everyday.

I’m pretty sure that getting the weight loss ball rolling would indeed be painful, and a tremendous struggle of mind over matter to say the least. But any type of exercise was never designed to be easy, it was designed to be exercise. And anyone who’s ever tried a step class (and failed miserably) will know that exercise can be painful, complicated and downright humiliating whatever size you are.

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Getting away with murder

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Everyday around the world, millions of children are slowly dying at the hands of those meant to protect them – their parents. It’s a slow and silent abuse, carried out over many years, on view for all to see and even condoned by the society that we live in. But these children aren’t being beaten or bruised. They aren’t being kicked or shaken or burnt, they aren’t even having a hand laid on them.

The crime committed against them? They are being fattened up and killed with kindness, one chicken nugget at a time. While many of these parents fail to realise the part that they play in their own child’s terrible fate, they are quite simply, getting away with murder.

Childhood obesity has become an epidemic, spreading out from the junk food fueled west and into developing countries across the world. According to the World Health Organization, a staggering 22 million children are now estimated to be overweight. And that’s only counting those under the age of 5. With 1 billion adults worldwide now overweight, with at least 300 million of them considered obese, this isn’t exactly a problem that has crept up on us and happened overnight. Far from it, it has taken millions of burgers and many years in the eating.

Obesity is a highly serious and chronic medical condition, associated with a wide range of debilitating and life threatening conditions. These include sleep problems, early puberty, eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia, skin infections, asthma, respiratory problems, liver disease, high blood pressure, heart disease and even cancer. It can also have a severe physiological impact on those affected, particularly children. From playground taunting and teasing to vicious bullying and harassment, obesity can lead to such intense levels of discrimination that it can eventually dictate the job that you have and the life that you may lead.

Despite popular misconception, obesity is not the same as just being overweight, it is when you have too much body fat for your height and age, and is defined by many doctors as being 20% above what your normal weight should be. It can be measured by calculating your BMI (Body Mass Index).

Children all grow at very different rates, so as a parent it can be hard to know what is normal ‘baby fat’ and what is a health crisis in the making. Chubby little legs indicate a healthy and well fed baby, and lets face it, this is probably the only time in your life when having folds of fat around your knees will be considered cute. But if your child is overweight by the time they go to kindergarten, then according to a Harvard Study Team, unless you help them to lose their ‘baby fat’ as they grow, it is likely that they will stay that way and continue to gain an unhealthy amount of weight as they get older.

Ignorance in understanding the facts have up until now perhaps been the biggest hurdle in overcoming childhood obesity, but with a recent wave of media attention and TV programmes highlighting the issues, ignorance is no longer an acceptable excuse. Parents who act dumb or worse still don’t act at all, should, in my opinion, be taken out, strung up and pelted with eggs at dawn. The cause of childhood obesity is NOT rocket science and it is not, as many like to claim, down to having a snail slow metabolism or being ‘big boned’.

Obesity, in both children and adults, is down to consuming more sugar, fat and calories than your body needs and then not doing enough physical exercise to burn them all off.

Genetics do play a part, but is this down more to inherited biology or from learning bad habits? Studies have shown that while 50% of children with obese mothers and 40.1% with obese fathers do go on to become either overweight or obese themselves, a high percentage of parents with a normal body weight also have children facing the same problem.

So if biology is partly to blame, is it inheriting a gene that makes a child gain weight simply by looking at a doughnut, or is it more to do with exposing and subjecting a child to their parent’s own unhealthy eating pattern and lifestyle?

Other behavioural factors have also been linked to childhood obesity, such as stress, boredom, sadness, anxiety, low self esteem and depression. Any of these, as we all know can trigger off a pattern of comfort and binge eating, which would in turn create a very vicious and potentially unbreakable circle. A lack of sleep may also be to blame, with a Harvard study carried out this year showing that for those children who do not get enough sleep, as well as having a negative impact on their emotional and social welfare and their performance in school, they also may have an increased risk of being overweight.

Childhood obesity in many ways can also be blamed on the technological, social, economic and environmental changes that have taken place in our world. A world where people are now too busy to eat anything off a plate. Where young girls would rather be drinking themselves under the table than cooking food to eat off it. Where children think a Playstation counts as exercise and that the Golden Arches are one of the natural wonders of the world.

I think childhood obesity can also be blamed in part on Ray Croc, one of the men initially responsible for bringing junk food to the masses.

Without his ‘vision’ of fueling the world on burgers and fries, there might not be 31,000 McDonald’s restaurants in 119 countries, serving more than 47 million people every day. Many of these restaurants are deliberately being built within walking distance of schools, targeting those who are not only more susceptible to the charms of the marketing ads but also those who are most at risk from the long term effects of eating too much of this type of food.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not on a personal crusade against Ronald and his chicken nuggets, or even those who eat them. Jamie Oliver has already gone down that particular path in 2006 and successfully achieved, along with the National Heart Forum, a ban in the UK on advertising unhealthy food products during children’s TV programmes.

What I personally do have an issue with is firstly that McDonalds target their trans fat and salt laden Happy Meals at children aged 3-9, and then make sure that they double or triple their sales by marketing them with promotional movie tie-in toys – none of which actually do anything or even last past the back seat of the car.

A company finally fighting back against this trend is Disney. For the last 10 years they have filled the Happy Meal boxes with little Nemos, Mr. Incredibles and 101 Dalmatians. But as they now wish to distance themselves with fast food and its links to the epidemic of childhood obesity, they have cut their ties with the chain.

Of course as they say, you can lead a person to the counter but you can’t make them eat a burger.

So yes, although companies make a fortune supplying the food, it is the parents who are letting their offspring gorge themselves silly. It is parents who take their children to fast food restaurants for their Sunday lunch, for their birthday parties and as a reward for doing well at school (myself included, slap on the hand and I won’t do it again).

There is photo of a boy at McDonalds doing the rounds on the Internet, one which I am sure McDonalds doesn’t appreciate, but this single image highlights exactly what the problem is.

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It’s not that people eat junk food some of the time, it’s that some people let their children eat junk food all of the time.

The good news is that finally, after 25 years, the levels of climbing obesity rates amongst children are starting to stall – according to the CDC and based on survey data gathered from 1999 to 2006 and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

So the damage caused to children by this epidemic can be stopped, prevented and even reversed. If their parents help them to live a healthier life, this generation could be the one that puts an end to this problem and saves future generations from facing the same fight.

Childhood Obesity is not a Fat v Thin debate.

It is not about pointing the finger or casting blame. It is not about wearing the right dress size, being popular or even fitting in. It is simply about keeping your child healthy and giving them the best possible start to their life.

Whatever lifestyle an adult chooses to lead and the medical consequences that may come about because of it, are solely down to that individual. But a child’s diet and physical well being are an entirely different matter and are, I think, the responsibility of society as a whole. Children need to be taught what is healthy and what is not. They need to be taught to treat exercise as a way of life, and not something that stands between them and their TV schedule. They need to be taught that just because they are offered an upsize on every meal, it doesn’t make it a bargain that they can’t refuse.

Parents need to learn when to say “No” and how to enforce some serious tough love in the kitchen. It is knowing how much your child actually needs to eat and then being strong enough to tell your pleading little angel to put down that third muffin and step away from the sweetie jar. You will never starve your child with such measures, but if you keep on letting them dictate their own menu, you may as well just go out and buy a goose, pump food down its throat and sit back to wait for the Foie gras.

To slowly starve a child to death is a crime, a crime punishable with a jail sentence. So surely logic would say that to feed your child to an early grave is no different and therefore deserves to be treated the same way.

Another article I have written about obesity can be found here.