The government is thinking of making restaurants put on the menu the number of calories in dishes.
The government is thinking of making restaurants put on the menu the number of calories in dishes. Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, spoke of an ‘obesogenic environment’.
I thought he’d made up the word obesogenic. It’s a bastard formation, half-Latin and half-Greek. But my husband tells me it has been around in bariatric circles for decades. ‘Bariatric?’ I said. Yes, he said, bariatrics is a medical specialty spawned in America in the 1960s, in response to a condition brought on by prosperity, but now prevalent among the poor: fatness.
Perhaps Mr Lansley should have spoken of a barogenic environment. At least baro- comes from Greek, though baros is used in the New Testament to mean ‘burden’, as in ‘the heat and burden of the day’.
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