The Times  06 Aug 2007

Dr Hamish Meldrum, the head of the British Medical Association, thinks that obese people are “greedy”.  His word choice is troublesome, to say the least.  “Greedy” is a moral word implying taking more than you need and thus depriving other people. So, because obese people eat lots, there’s less for me? Hardly. Perhaps he is talking about greediness in terms of the NHS (this is not implied, much less spelled out). By that token, he might talk about smokers and drinkers as greedy. He doesn’t. In this context, the word is loaded with simple distaste for fat and all that it implies — ugliness, unsightliness and so on. He might as well have added “porky” for good measure.

 

Dr Meldrum complains about the ease with which medication is dispensed to treat obesity. If it is wrongly dispensed, that is the doctor’s fault. Not the “greedy” fat person who receives a silly diagnosis. Again, blame the fattie.  He fails to take any notice of what leads to overeating or the ease with which some people become humonguously fat. Does he really think that people carrying around dozens of extra pounds are happily sitting there rejoicing in their greed? That scoffing chips is their wellspring of happiness? As a thin man himself, perhaps he doesn’t know how physically, psychologically and socially uncomfortable it is being fat.

A study in 2004 by Johns Hopkins University found that morbidly obese people had five times the risk of depression than those weighing less than about 113kg. For a fat person, food may well be their only friend. Other pleasures or reinforcements will not be growing on trees. Perhaps he has never looked at the National Obesity Forum website, which lists “acknowledge the complexity of the condition” as its second edict. “Overweight and obese patients often have a fear of (and unfortunately experience of) being labelled as simply ‘greedy’ or ‘lazy’ ”.

He talks about prevention rather than treatment of obesity. But telling people not to be so greedy is hardly going to help people keep the pounds off. It is far from that simple — just ask anyone who has tried to lose weight. Then there’s genetics. Research suggests that, for some overweight people, genes account for just 25 per cent of the predisposition to be overweight, while for others the genetic influence is as high as 70 to 80 per cent. Failing to overcome this kind of predisposition can hardly be called “greedy”. I’d call it “human”.

Obesity is not good. But this is a free market and people can buy what they like and what makes sense. Maybe if the wealthy, thin people of the world stopped driving up the prices of healthy food with demands that everything be organic, a punnet of strawberries might start to look just as appealing as a doughnut to those