Is it your fault if you’re fat?

Sorry Santa, but there’s no sugar-coating this: you’re eating too much. And it’s nobody’s fault but your own. Human beings have agency. You have it within your power to cut down.

An excellent book written by restaurateur and policy adviser Henry Dimbleby, with his wife Jemima Lewis, sets out the figures. They’re shocking. In Ravenous: How to Get Ourselves and Our Planet into Shape, Dimbleby shows that in some 70 years we’ve regressed from being a nation where almost nobody was obese and less than 4 per cent of people were overweight, to today’s Britain, where some two-thirds are either overweight or obese. The UK is shamefully high on the list of fatties, but the rest of the West faces similar problems.

The consequences are dire. The cost to the nation as regards the NHS, social care and the economy is about £100 billion per annum, and rising fast. Eating has overtaken smoking in the damage it’s doing to us.