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. So, gritting my teeth, I accept Dimbleby’s recommendations that government use the tax system to discourage the manufacture and consumption of the things that, consumed in excess, are killing us, like sugar, salt and fat; take at least some responsibility for helping feed the poorest children; regulate marketing techniques that encourage over-purchasing (like ‘buy one, get one free’); and – where definitions are easy, which they often aren’t – restrict the advertising of junk food.

Many readers will react instinctively against this nanny-state approach, but Dimbleby has persuaded me. After all, he’s not trying to ban foods, just nudging our habits by upping price and restraining marketing. I hate to say it, but he’s resoundingly right.

I have, though, one problem with this important book. I’ll stick my neck out here. Yes, these government measures would help; yes we should try them; but no, they’re unlikely to affect the public’s eating habits at more than the margins.