It’s often said of television in the US that it’s a culture in which “fat people watch thin people do stuff”. If so, the obverse is probably true in the UK, where domestic TV now consists of fat people watching fat people do stuff.
Obesity makes for compelling drama: and thus the prime-time schedules are bloated with endless reality TV shows, in which overweight punters try to shed improbable amounts of fat. Designed to appeal to the voyeur in all of us, they’re utterly captivating. Who wouldn’t feel a shiver of vicarious relief that it’s that poor sweating individual on the screen and not you having to run on specially strengthened treadmills or exist on a diet of celery for six months, their only companion a chisel faced fitness instructor and a film crew. “At least I’m not that bad,” we say to ourselves as we grasp the remote control even tighter and take another handful of potato crisps.
This grim paradox reaches Kafkaesque proportions during the advertising breaks, which often consist of puffs for calorific foodstuffs intermingled with other advertisements promoting the benefits of outlandish weight-loss schemes: there’s liposuction of course, but there are also some other, rather more odd, solutions. Dietary additives made from algae that promises to miraculously dissolve, eat or burn off excess fat while you sleep, or preposterous mechanical contraptions, which are billed as being able to magically melt away that excess flab by means of electrical impulses without you having to do anything more strenuous than switching on a plug.
If indeed they do cause you to shed pounds, it’ll only be the pounds that have miraculously disappeared from your wallet in the process of purchasing these products. The inconvenient truth – that you can only guarantee to lose weight by eating less and exercising more – is one the developed world doesn’t want to hear.
But while we may stuff our ears (and mouths) and look the other way, obesity is becoming a global pandemic. In countries as far afield as the US, China and even Australia, a nation once fiercely proud of its sporty reputation, waistlines are spreading. Indeed, even in the UAE a recent well-documented report confirmed that children as young as five are now being seen for weight loss surgery. And so we have the shaming scenario of one half of the world on the brink of malnutrition while the other half are so fat they can hardly waddle from their beds to the fridge.
Well, it seems that the medical profession in the UK may be bowing to the inevitable. For years the grandees in charge of Nice, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (and the organ which administers the National Health Service), have been warning of a ticking medical time bomb in the form of type 2 diabetes, a condition directly linked to excessive weight and one affecting 2.9 million UK citizens. The message to the sufferers was simple: adjust your lifestyle now, or face illness and disability in the future.
But this month Nice announced that free weight-loss surgery could soon be offered to nearly a million diabetics previously considered ineligible.
The economic factors surrounding this apparent volte-face are beyond question. A simple stomach bypass costs just over £5,000 (Dh31,300) a go, while the fitting of a gastric band runs to roughly half that cost. Yet while the cost of offering such procedures to nearly a million new claimants may be colossal, it will still be cheaper in the long run than treating the diabetes that will inevitably prevail if lifestyles remain unchanged.
Critics have been quick to point out the moral madness of this apparent policy shift.
As well as relieving the individuals in question from any sense of having to take control of their lifestyles, the increased quantity of surgery must also result in precious funds and resources being diverted from other, more deserving areas of the NHS, such as helping those suffering from cancer or strokes.
Never mind. Madness is what the world is all about now, at least when it comes to eating. Come to think of it, perhaps the NHS could televise their operations live and in doing so claw back some of the current £30 billion funding deficit by selling space in the ad breaks.
“Competitive weight loss surgery”: three surgeons, three patients and a maximum of 90 minutes to complete the procedure. The first person to rise from their bed and walk 100 metres unaided wins a year’s supply of M&Ms. Now there’s a programme I’m sure we’d all watch.
Michael Simkins is an actor and writer based in London
On Twitter: @michael_simkins
