On the day that the main headline at 9.00am on the BBC news site is England to have 13m obese by 2010, I’m trying to work out why this seems such familiar territory. Then I find it – in May 2004, we were all going mad about obesity just as we are now, and the Guardian published an extract from a book by Paul Campos called The Obesity Myth. I haven’t read the book, or it’s companion The Diet Myth , but you get the drift, and it’s for counterargument like this that I like the Guardian. Two years on, and the obesity panic seems as real and incontrovertible as airline terrorism, and sadly the Guardian no longer has the article on its site. Obesity is already costing us £1bn a year according to Patricia Hewitt – could she sound any more like Marjorie Dawes if she tried? [Update at 9.30 – this sentence now seems to have disappeared from the story!]
Out of interest, the NHS IT overhaul is allegedly costing £12.4bn, double the initial quote of £6.2bn. In June, The Register opened an article with the phrase “The £6.2bn National Programme for IT will henceforward be known as the £12.4bn National Programme for IT, after a long-awaited National Audit Office report into the ambitious NHS IT scheme revealed the full extent of its costs to date.”, though the Guardian still refers to it by the £6.2bn figure in an article about iSoft published today.
I’m deeply suspicious of the obesity panic, not because I don’t think that we have a problem (heaven knows, I’m trying to lose some pounds myself), but because there’s so little intelligent debate and argument about it, and so little government commitment to dealing with root causes (it was Jamie Oliver who’s done more to help than any health minister or doctor). If this was already a story back in 2004, what have the government or the NHS done about it, and why are they holding up their hands in horror in 2006 as if it were news?
This is why I like blogs. I only remember the 2004 panic because I’d blogged about the Paul Campos book. Two years later, all I have to do is search my own blog for the word ‘obesity’ and there it is. When we have so much information pouring out of every channel, every minute of the day, it’s frighteningly easy to lose track of the narrative. It makes you wonder what else has been pushed out of your mind by the latest media ‘story’.
Meanwhile, my Prague 2006 pictures are now online.
