BIG FAT Lies: Porky Pies about obesity

What really shortens lives? Reading this sort of crap in the papers

We used to burn a lot of food just keeping warm, remember

Similarly with smoking. If a smoker keels over young then it's their years of life that have been lost. Thus that's a private cost to them. And so it is again with obesity. If that tub-of-Häagen-Dazs-a-day habit means you die 20 years early then the cost of your dying is that you don't get to live 20 years. That's a cost to you, not to the rest of us.

The public costs to the rest of us are the health care you need before you die minus the health care we don't need to finance for you after you're dead: as above we make out like bandits on this deal. Most especially as most of the missing years of life come after people retire.

And let's not even begin to think about the pension payments that don't need to be made.

Yet what really has me frothing with rage - shortening my life in a private cost imposed on me by these McKinsey dunderheads - over and above this complete mess about what are costs to society and what are not, is that there's almost no discussion of the basic problem itself. Which is that weight is a simple function of calories ingested as against calories expended. They do admit that in passing: but then fail to note the most important thing about this balance over the past century or so. We, us rich westerners, are all eating many fewer calories than we used to.

Yes, this is even true (on average of course) of those whales one sees in People of Wal-Mart. In fact, average daily calorie consumption in the UK is below the levels at which wartime rationing experts worried that people started to lose weight. But we're not losing weight, are we? So, obviously, despite the fact that we're eating less it must be that our expenditure of calories has fallen, fallen more than our ingestion of them.

Yes, this is true even though processed food is loaded up with sugar (largely to cover up the fact that food without fat in it tastes of nothing very much). Food is vastly cheaper than it used to be and food only makes up 13% or so of the family budget these days as opposed to 40% in 1900.

So what has actually happened? Obviously, many fewer of us are doing manual labour these days. Further, daily activities outside of work (to take housework just as one example) require a great deal less physical effort than they used to. We drive more than we cycle, our clothes are warmer - and perhaps the biggest influence is that our houses are warmer. Youngsters might not quite get this but among us greybeards it was entirely normal in our youth that there would be no central heating. And if there was any it most certainly wasn't used in bedrooms throughout the night: ice on the inside of winter windows was not a catastrophe it was normal experience. And, given that we're mammals and a goodly portion of mammal calorie expenditure is on heat regulation that one on its own really shouldn't surprise us.

There's also an element of this all being self-solving as well. As there's going to be in discussing anything to do with the English, there's a certain amount of class involved here. Although it's socio-economic class, not the somewhat more exotic English concept of social class, which is why much the same effects will be seen in the US and other places. Any even observation no matter how light is going to show that it's largely the poor who are the really gross lardbuckets. Sure, there's a few tremebously rich and porky Tory MPs and the like scattered throughout the society but to find entire families whose buttocks look like small boys fighting under blankets does mean looking at the poor these days. And that really wasn't how it was 50 or 60 years ago.

Back then it was the middle classes that were portly. Nowadays it's the middle classes doing all the Pilates and going to Weight Watchers.

And this is where I get into speculation - reasonable speculation, but I wouldn't want to have to prove this, not just yet. And that speculation is that we've been seeing the various classes reduce their calorie expenditure at different times. It then takes a generation or so for the diets of those classes to adjust to the new numbers.

Back 50 or more years the low socio-economic groups were actually working at manual labour. And labour saving devices, including that central heating, simply weren't part of their household experience. The largely newly minted middle classes back then (the great growth of which happened inter-war) had largely given up the manual labour and had some of that new gadgetry. Diets, however, didn't change all that much: thus the working classes were not obese but photos of the better off of those days do show those vast expanses of waistcoat over which watch chains were hung.

As time went on manual labour became a thing of the past for nearly all, as that labour saving machinery in the home became nigh-on universal. But middle class diets changed and the middle classes of more recent years are, by comparison at least, rather slimmer than their parents. The working classes have not yet changed diets to accord with that lesser calorie expenditure. But they will, they will, just as others did before them.

As I say that is rather speculative but I think it's supportable even if I wouldn't want to have to prove it. It accords with what we think we know: people are eating less food now than they used to, they're also doing less exercise than they used to, and they don't burn nearly as much food staying warm as they used to. One group got fat before the other, at least in memory, and one group also got thinner again even as the following group got fat.

My supposition being that there's a lag between calorie expenditure falling and a societal change in calories ingested falling. That lag happening to different groups, different classes if you wish, in different recent generations.

All of which brings us back to pondering why McKinsey, who we know aren't stupid, drawing up a list of 77 (yep, count 'em, 77!) different interventions that must be rolled out in an inclusive, society wide and coordinated package. For a problem that really does seem likely to solve itself, and which really isn't costing society (as opposed to the individuals concerned) anything much at all.

I assume that McKinsey are pitching for the job of doing a lot of the coordinating of the interventions. This is something that makes me angry - that they'd try it on - and sad, in that they'll almost certainly succeed, such is the state of politics today. ®