Are we prepared for the end of obesity?

Sixty years ago, my biology teacher told me (so it must have been true) that after the war, some Americans were so delighted that the restrictions on food had been lifted that they ate capsules containing a tape worm so that they could eat to their heart’s content without getting fat. This, of course, revolted me, as it was intended to. I never forgot what she said. 

Twenty years later, I was to see the future of the world, at least as far as obesity and type-II diabetes were concerned, on the island of Nauru. There, the inhabitants had suddenly become very rich, thanks to the mining of phosphate rock, and went from a strenuous subsistence to wealthy indolence in a matter of years. With nothing much else to do, they ate and drank enormously, grew fat, suffered from diabetes and died early. 

This was the fate of much of the western world, give or take the indolence, especially, though not exclusively, in the English-speaking part of it.