To show how deadly serious the "obesity epidemic" has become, anti-fat activists want to take their medicine show to every corner of the globe.
The BBC, a reliably gullible conveyor of junk science, took a memo from the chairman of the International Obesity Taskforce and faithfully delivers this unintentionally hilarious "news story" to the public. A global pact is needed, so says the chairman, to ensure everyone is fed healthy food. Further, the obesity problem is so great that action is needed right now, even though there is no clear evidence of what would constitute the best options. He envisions a planetary thrust on the lines of the world-wide effort to tackle global warming.
How this comparison must distress the anti-tobacco operatives who regard the climate change hysterics as parvenus, cashing in on the toil of the anti-smoking crusaders. If there must be pattern for a global war on fat to draw inspiration from, they would insist, it should be the global treaty on tobacco signed by most nations several years go.
The tobacco control industry must take some collegial pride, however, at the brazen nonsense the chairman is spewing as he lobbies for a global war on fat. In Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) he said that the obesity epidemic was the result of "all the wonderful, apparent economic development changes."
"Apparent," he says, because the worldwide economic changes that have resulted in people not starving to death or working themselves to an early grave performing intense, wearying manual labor are surely less than wonderful, because now the masses are growing fat. Perhaps starvation wasn’t such a bad thing after all. The elites have always thought that way. There is much in this article to laugh at but one bit of zaniness bears repeating in full:
"Because these children start off being born small, they are then exposed to totally inappropriate environments, and they are therefore super-sensitive."
The "inappropriate" environment is one that includes a reliable food supply. Reliable food, to the anti-fat crowd, is like an allergen, making the "super-sensitive" child fat. Everyone growing up in North America or Europe remembers the lecture they’d get from their mothers about the need to eat all their vegetables because children were starving in China or India or Africa. Instead of being happy that starvation is on the wane the behavior engineers are gearing up for an assault on people who, finally, have enough to eat.
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