Oh dear. The government wants us to know that there is an obesity epidemic that is going to eat up the National Health Service budget. If the general public doesn’t shape up fast, 90% of adults and two-thirds of children will be either overweight or obese by 2050.

Obesity is undoubtedly a problem, but the government’s approach sets off alarm bells. One of the recurring motifs in its Change4Life report is the body mass index (BMI). The report assumes that anyone with a BMI between 25 and 30 is overweight and anyone with a BMI over 30 is obese. Yet the BMI is not a measure of fatness, fat distribution or health risks but a statistical whimsy dealing with the ratio between height and weight.

Most gym instructors, heavy with muscle mass, will have BMIs that the government has deemed overweight or obese and so will millions of healthy people whom we would not in any way consider obese: George Clooney is one and there’s every chance that you are another.

Is this really an epidemic, comparable to Aids or cholera, or just another scare based on dodgy statistics? Certainly the medical term “epidemic”, with its disaster movie connotations, serves to mask something more complex that has been brewing for the past 25 years as we have become ever more distant from the mechanisms of hunger and satisfaction. The reasons for the so-called epidemic are many and work together with a terrible synergy, creating a mass of eating troubles. Obesity is just the most visible of these problems.

First, a look back. In the 1980s the government’s infatuation with everything private led it to sell school playing fields, dismantle school kitchens and give catering contracts to whoever could deliver the cheapest cooked food, never mind the ingredients. Then there was the disappearance of cooking lessons – boring as all hell, as I remember – but important in maintaining a notion that food preparation is worth knowing about.

At the same time as this government folly, the food industry and the supermarkets embraced “segmentation”, creating more products and more niches as a way to increase sales. Diet foods, lunchbox ingredients, gourmet lines, sumptuous treats, healthy options, organic – a proliferation of new labels meant that we started to put more food in our baskets than we used to, losing a proper sense of our hunger and how to satisfy it.

Shoppers, it seems, have got used to buying low-fat to feel virtuous, then rewarding themselves for their virtue by buying fat-saturated “treats”. There’s even a direct correlation between the rise of our girth and the consumption of low-fat milk, a drink trumpeted as being an über-responsible and wise choice.

Given this history, it’s interesting to note that the commercial partners of Change4Life include such food industry players as Kellogg’s, PepsiCo, Kraft and Unilever and that the diet industry – a particularly profitable branch of the food industry – gets a great write-up in Change4Life. Diet and slimming clubs, which the government recommends and supports in this initiative, depend for profit on the failure of their customers.

You don’t believe me? A study by Traci Mann at the University of California, Los Angeles reveals what almost every dieter knows: one can take weight off but it comes back on. If dieting worked you would have to do it only once. In order to be profitable, this industry relies on repeat customers who go through a treadmill of periods of bingeing or dieting. Repeated dieting slows your metabolism so that whatever value it might have decreases with each endeavour, but from the commercial point of view that’s not a problem – it’s an opportunity.

Industry canniness and political idiocy aren’t the only reasons for the increase in our general lardiness. Our own habits, our increasingly sedentary lives spent glued to screens, have also contributed hugely to the rise in obesity and Change4Life is right to focus on encouraging us to walk or cycle to school and work and provide provision for it. That’s excellent.

The government is also sensible in attempting to right wrongs by bringing back school kitchens and encouraging cookery classes. However, getting into bed with the food industry without challenging the ways in which that industry is complicit in the rise of eating problems is not imaginative and, regrettably, not likely to succeed.

The slogans, the “healthy towns”, the voucher incentives to walk to school and the advertising blitz are all very well, but what’s missing in the Change4Life mix is any attempt to understand what food means to people.

Food is not only fuel, or calories in and calories out. It is our first and most fundamental emotional experience, which we turn to for all sorts of comforts. Endlessly exhorted to lose weight, we’ve been numbed by nagging and blinded by incentives until food is a source of anxiety and fear.

Epidemics, indeed! It’s simpler than that: we’ve lost the capacity to know when we are hungry, how to eat with relish and to stop when we are full. If only Change4Life acknowledged this it would have a better chance of succeeding.

Susie Orbach is the author of Fat is a Feminist Issue

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