IT IS an epidemic made, literally, flesh. We are eating too much and exercising too little; the svelte are becoming the slovenly. In the UK about 16 per cent of children are obese, treble the figure in 1990. A supersized society, we are told, will die with a burger in its belly. The technology-enslaved children of today will gasp their last in front of the TV, a remote control buried within their fat folds and their pallid, corpulent bodies riddled with the formerly adult diseases of diabetes and atherosclerosis. Most ghoulish of all, they will be buried by the parents who outlive them.
This is the obesity orthodoxy, strengthened daily by the mass-media repetition of the assured clichés wheeled out to describe our swelling waistlines: the “global obesity epidemic”, or “globesity”, is a “ticking time bomb” about to detonate. But how has this orthodoxy arisen? What, exactly, is the evidence that people, especially children, are becoming less active? Has the child-obesity bandwagon — which makes technology and slothfulness the pantomime villains of health — become a lazy, Luddite crusade against children?
These heretical questions come courtesy of two researchers in Australia, who are urging experts to press the “pause” button on the panic over portliness. The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality and Ideology, by Dr Michael Gard and Professor Jan Wright, is a controversial attempt, involving the analysis of 250 obesity papers over the past four years, to dash perceived myths about why youngsters are getting fatter. They don’t doubt that waistlines are expanding — although they believe the epidemic to be exaggerated — but they dispute the reasons given. In particular, they question the assumption that television and PCs are taking the place of physical activity. “The idea that more of one equals less of another is a myth,” says Gard, a physical fitness academic at Charles Sturt University in Australia. “If you put all the studies on television and computers together, they explain just 1 per cent of the variation in children’s activity levels. So if you’re looking at what influences physical activity, studying how long they spend on the computer or in front of the telly tells you almost nothing. Instead of replacing physical activity, TV is more likely to have replaced other sedentary behaviour, such as reading.” This finding, he says, makes a nonsense of policies to introduce more physical activities into the curriculum as a weapon against childhood obesity.
In addition to questioning the idea of children’s inertia, Gard notes that obesity science is riven by glaring uncertainties and contradictions. Most papers, he says, close with the depressing conclusion that the causes of obesity — other than the truism that it results from more calories being consumed than expended — remain unknown. “Science as it is now practised has nothing to offer the war on obesity,” he says. “Despite thousands of papers, researchers themselves say they still don’t have any robust, useful knowledge for tackling it. What we know today is, in essence, no different from what we knew 100 years ago.”
Which is that some thin people remain thin even when fed generously, while some stout individuals remain stout even on meagre diets, thus complicating the energy in/energy out argument of weight gain (genes muddle matters; faulty ones can lead to fatness, but genes also shape food preferences and hunger pangs). Worse, scientists — urged to mould a socially useful comment out of scientific uncertainty — often end up recommending more physical activity and selfrestraint, thereby strengthening the illusion that a gluttonous, lazy youth has shaped its own downfall.
Gard was inspired to write the book with Wright, a professor of education at the University of Wollongong, because the obesity epidemic seemed to hinge on demonising children: “I got tired of the chorus of denigration of today’s children. I was worried because, as a physical educator, people in my profession were falling over to say how pathetic children were. I just wasn’t seeing it. I don’t have children, but I have nieces and nephews, and they are extremely active. They go to soccer and ballet, but also have five Nintendos in the bedroom. I got a feeling that this was a common social phenomenon among middle-class families, and it didn’t match the stereotype we’re using to understand obesity.”
Their book also makes an important sociological point — that concern about overfed, underexercised, soft-muscled children is not new. The idea of overindulged youngsters dates at least back to the 1950s, and seems to tap into the ever-popular fear of society going into physical decline and, by extension, moral meltdown (it inspired John F. Kennedy to start a national fitness programme for American children in 1960). Even in the 19th century, educational reformers espoused organised sports as a means of countering indolence and strengthening moral fibre. In addition, Gard says, it has become a ritual for every generation to caricature successive generations as corrupted and “softened up” by modernisation. Soaring childhood obesity presents an easy target. If the book encourages people to shun the “bad child/bad parent” theory of child obesity, Gard says he’ll be happy.
So where does the blame lie? It is no coincidence, he suggests, that the “active children” theory is proffered regularly by the food industry (who can forget Cadbury-Schweppes’s ill-advised campaign for schools to earn sports equipment by collecting chocolate-bar wrappers?) “If I had to put money on it, I would say it’s the increasing ubiquity of food — and poor-quality food — and the sophisticated way it is marketed. It’s about public policy, ideology and the moral behaviour of large corporations.”
The view chimes with a widespread academic view that the relatively recent availability of energy-dense foods and sugary drinks is messing up children’s ability to self-regulate their calorie intake. Energy-dense foods, a euphemism for junk foods, pack a high calorific punch for their portion size, so children in particular end up eating more than they need. Neville Rigby, the director of policy at the International Obesity Task Force (IOTF), also says the finger of blame points primarily to energy-dense foods and sugary drinks that bypass the body’s satiety mechanism, so people eat more calories than they need before feeling full (the IOTF also thinks that the jury is out over whether children are less active than previous generations, though Rigby notes that children seem to watch TV for longer and car travel has increased.)
Gard says that researchers are in danger of being thrown off the junk-food scent by pursuing the thesis of lazy/greedy/spoilt children bringing it on themselves. “When I go to the US I’m brought up short by the levels of obesity,” he muses. “What makes America different from the rest of the world? Well, there’s a huge oversupply of food and this has been contorted by the way in which food is marketed and advertised. The food industry has become an important lobby group.” Politicians do not want to upset this powerful coterie, Gard says, so their behaviour goes unchecked.
Dr Susan Jebb, an obesity scientist at the Medical Research Council human nutrition research centre in Cambridge, says it is pointless arguing that inactivity and junk food are the sole reasons society is getting fatter because the proof just doesn’t exist. “I couldn’t agree more that people should not be stigmatised. It’s shocking that in an age of increasing political correctness that people are so rude and prejudicial towards obese people.
“But to say it’s one or the other [inactivity or junk food] is ridiculously naive. Are people less active today than they used to be? I’ve no idea; we don’t have data from 50 years ago. We can say that people walk less but more people belong to gyms. We know that almost no jobs are classed as manual any more and the most popular leisure pursuits are watching television and playing computer games, which are sedentary. So it’s intuitively plausible that we’re less active.”
But dietary data, she points out, is not perfect either. Historically, food surveys concentrated on meals eaten at home, whereas dining out has become much more common. And since participants in food surveys may wish to appear healthier than they really are, they may “forget” to mention the chocolate bar they ate on the way to work. The result is a consistent bias towards under-reporting food intake.
Jebb says: “That’s why I get wound up by these polarised arguments — you can come to different conclusions depending on how you interpret the data. Also, arguing over the minutiae doesn’t tell us how to get out of this mess. I take the view that, yes, we’ve been hijacked by these colossal changes in the environment — mechanisation and technology, and an agricultural revolution that has given us a zillion food outlets wherever you turn. We are encouraged to consume, and our evolutionary mechanisms can’t cope with that. Yes, the food industry is part of the problem and needs to change.
“But the fact is that some people stay slim in the same environment. What are their strategies? Don’t keep fizzy drinks in the house. Never choose king-size meals. Choose the fun-size chocolate bar — whatever size you choose, the first bite is great and you savour the last, but you forget about the ones in the middle. If you want to treat the kids, do you take them to a restaurant, or swimming?”
She notes that there is clear evidence that exercise and a healthy diet cut the risk of heart disease and diabetes and, since these are correlated with weight, it is sensible to assume that the same strategies will cut weight. She acknowledges that the exact relationship between food, activity and obesity is not clear, especially because genes are involved, but “if we start demanding perfect evidence we will still be here in 50 years’ time, except that obesity will be much, much worse.”
Still, Gard predicts that the food industry will go the way of tobacco: “In 20 years’ time we’ll have brought in a whole range of social policies to regulate fast-food companies, among other things. People once thought that regulating tobacco was akin to communism, now we don’t think twice.”
- The Obesity Epidemic, Michael Gard and Jan Wright, Routledge, £14.99
