Prof says fatties a bigger menace than bin Laden Government health adviser Professor David Hunter believes obesity in the UK is now a greater threat than terrorism. The Durham University prof reckons the NHS needs to stop focusing exclusively on treatment of ill health and do more to promote good health. Hunter said: "The government was quick to move for things like ID …
If it is only _just_ as significant as the current terror threat, it's not worth bothering about. I thought most health professionals thought it was more serious than this. It is certainly not as serious as the demographic timebomb, however, the best hope of dealing with which is to let people die earlier from their unhealthy lifestyles.
I'm not scared of fatties, I can run a heck of a lot faster than your average fat git.
Bin Liner on the other hand, man, he scares the living be-jebus outta me!
He could be hiding anywhere in London with that big long beard of his, incognito, ready to strike at any moment!
A fatty you can spot from a mile away, throw a few choice taunts and still out manoeuvre the podgy big pie eaters.
That Prof is talking cobblers, Bin Liner is a real and present danger and citizens should be vigilant - and eat less pie.
I wish people would stop coming out with this rubbish about how fatties/smokers/drinkers etc are going to kill the NHS and drive the country bankrupt. It's just complete nonsense.
They are contributing huge amounts of dosh to the public coffers by paying for their disgusting habits. They are then contributing all over again by paying for fad diets, nicotine patches, gymn memberships etc. etc. THEN they are doing us another huge favour by keeling over with a heart attack at the age of 45, removing themselves from the pension pay-roll and massively reducing the amount the NHS has to spend on looking after them in their dotage.
The people who are costing us a fortune are the namby pamby bastards who insist we should treat them and keep the nasty fuckers alive!
Save oil. Burn a fat-bloke!
It's curious that the Prof picks ID cards and 42-day detention without trial - two highly unpopular strategies, which will probably be repealed when the Tories get in at the next election - as examples.
Surely getting the NHS to do more disease prevention would be a popular strategy. The anti-smoking stuff hasn't been popular, but people do understand it. I'd think a well-considered attitude to fatties would be taken the same way.
The second most annoying thing about this sort of interference (the most being the patronising attitude of individuals going far beyond their brief on advising into interference) is the misleading claims about the extra costs of obesity, smoking, or whatever..
The fact is that everybody is going to die of something - yes, you might postpone it, but as the government is finding out, extending lifespans introduces costs of its own. Quite apart from the known fact that health care for the elderly increases with age (controlling all those chronic conditions, nursing and so on), the social costs of caring increase too. If we could arrange a health care system where people lived healthier lives then suddenly dropped dead with minimal costs to the health care services, then there would be some validity in the argument that obesity, smoking, or whatever costs the NHS money. As it happens, all that is likely to result is that the onset of chronic conditions will be delayed a few years into the end of a longer life where, if anything, the welfare and health costs will be higher.
By all means this guy can make a case that improving health and lifespan is a valuable thing in its own right, but what it will not do is save the taxpayer money and to claim so is downright fraudulent. From a purely economic viewpoint encouraging people to smoke would make more sense - lung cancer tends to kill quickly without extended periods of chronic diseases to treat for year after year, you can tax the addicts who are too stupid to break the habit and in many cases they will drop dead before they get to be a huge burden on the welfare state and after they've made most of their economic contributions.
So by all means promote better health and related longer lives, but please don't pretend it saves the state money. (I recall a Yes Prime Minister episode expounding this very point about tobacco tax revenues).
The damage to civil liberties and useless airport / border security measures pretty much are a greater menace to average joe than bin laden, the alienation of whole populations with stupid laws, increasing the threat.
The cure worse than the disease.
I can see now a greater menace of BMA health nuts being a greater menace. Taxes on non healthy foods, national insurance hikes if you skip the gym.
The cure worse than the disease.
Pretty much everything is a greater threat in the UK than terrorism - lawnmowers, decorating, onions, contact lenses, rain, fish bones - the list is endless. Of course, we might well ask "threat to what, exactly?" Public health is NOT the practice of preventing people from dying. We all do it, and we need a wide variety of interesting ways to die to keep conversations at funerals interesting "oh, so he died of septicemia after sticking a garden fork through his foot? How sad...".
Face it, that book is pulp before it even hits the shelves.
..... and it's not cooking!
Hands up anyone who honestly doesn't believe the Government is angling to impose some sort of tax on "unhealthy" foods, and using obesity scare stories to groom us into accepting it?
Since the opening-up of the European market, the government have not been making nearly so much in fag tax as they used to (when was the last time you saw a packet of cigarettes or tobacco with English writing on it?) and so have decided almost, but not quite, to ban smoking altogether. (Another effect of this move was that smugglers stopped importing Moroccan solid, which was heavy and had limited appeal, and switched instead to importing cigarettes which weighed considerably less and had much wider appeal; thus prompting a short-term upsurge in consumption of harder drugs until people started growing dope at home.)
Meaning that, in order to fund more pay rises for MPs and tax cuts for the obscenely rich, another source of revenue is required. They tried taxing fuel, but people beat that by walking. But people can't not eat! A tax on food would be the Holy Grail -- if, and only if, it could be made to fly. Hence the constant bombardment with stories about obesity. Even better are stories about **childhood** obesity; because that gives them an excuse to get kids thoroughly used to the idea of being weighed, measured and having their lunchbox contents inspected like good little citizens.
Don't fall for it, people! Tomorrow it will be taxes on chips and chocolate. Two budgets down the line, you won't be able to buy a small organic rocket salad with fat-free, salt-free, vinegar-free, oil-free, taste-free dressing without paying tax on it.
I agree with him. Not only are fatties a health issue (Fancy one tripping over and landing on you?), they also not appealling to the eye. I say that anyone not within a defined weight/height graph definition of normal should be sent to fat camp to slim down.
And that ugly women should be banned from leaving the house.
And that all attractive women should wear really skimpy clothes.
A few other things I think should be made law, but I'm already at risk of being shot for the above comments anyway.......
Detain overweight tourists for 42 days without food? Introduce body mass measurement at airports rather than getting people to take their shoes off? Refuse to allow airline passengers to fly if their trousers won't stay up without a belt? Make carrying food onto an airplane illegal? Reduce the width of airplane seats?
Oh, wait, fat is killing people. I thought you said fatties were killing people.
Right, so porking out is a bigger threat than terrorism?
I can only think of one possible way this could even remotely be true - this would involve a "Mr Creosote with a wafer thin mint"-esque scenario, with said chubber exploding over those nearby.
Other than that how do we (acknowledging I'm not in the waif brigade) pose as big a threat as some disgruntled Allah-lover crying "Jihad" and detonating his Semtex waistcoat?
This sounds like another story of some Fu©ktard professor who's not stepped outside the loving hug of his campus since 1978 trying to commentate on real life.
Oh, and sell a book on it as well. There goes any shred of credibility that may have remained.
Paris, cos she's skinny and has the intellect of a Durham Professor.
To right, claiming obesity is equal to the current security issues is pure bollocks, obesity is a serious threat that will cost billions in health care. And security? blah....conspiracy theories....blah...all out to get you....blah...etc...etc, I'm not even going to bother except for this. We are under this huge threat that could bring the nation to its knees, right? So how come all the power lines and sub-stations aren't surrounded by security?
First it was smokers, then drinkers, now fatties (I'm 24Stone, a smoker AND a moderate drinker) but soon it will be you.
Yes, once they have banned everything else that can kill you they will ban motorcycles/bicycles/skateboards/all adventure sports/excessive workouts/dieting/not dieting/etc.
You will be destined to live forever in TOTAL BOREDOM with everything decided for you. You will get your days calculated rations from a government controlled system and if you don't do your days prescribed workout you will get less food tomorrow.
If I die of a heart attack tomorrow at least I had fun on the way.
If I live to 90 I'll have had twice as much fun. :-)
The Nanny's can all go f*** themselves.
If I wanted to live forever I might give a s*** but I don't so they can all go hump a tree.
They can have my fags/food/drink/motorcycles when they pry them from my cold dead hands.
This fad to reduce salt in foods has caused me to have more cramps. Fortunately the summer is typical, or this would be worse. But I know what to do - more salt on my dinner. Unfortunately not everyone knows this connection - has Big Brother govrnmnt ever mentioned it? - so I can see GPs time being taken up by cramp-stricken "clients". And that assumes GPs spot the obvious connection and don't order expensive diagnostics or further referrals. I wonder if Prof has researched this hidden cost.
Government health adviser Professor David Hunter proves by example that fatuousness is now a greater threat than terrorism.
Hunter said: "The government was quick to move for things like ID cards or 42-day detention without trial - now it needs to show similar leadership in public health...The threat to our future health is just as significant as the current security threat," he said, according to the Beeb.
Hunter is clearly enamored of academia's obsession with public/private "partnerships" which thrust mindless wankers into the Beeb spotlight with weekly cries of some crisis or other demanding Better Leadership to make the Hard Decisions to Enhance Tax Revenues to Fund More Research. Oh, yes, and to buy and distribute copies of his new book in all schools, colleges, police stations, airports, and fast food restaurants.
Trying to become less of a menace to society (didn't get really really obese, just borderline- still not nice losing the ability to comfortably jog, though...)
Covered by private healthcare, loads of life insurance to make sure that my voluminous corpse can be laid to rest by the H&S mandated forklift without it burdening anyone else
So I'm entirely safe. Fuck. You. Professor.
It's the one with the burgers in the pockets.
Seriously, make footpaths wider and people will walk more. Make stairs in shopping centres more than an afterthought in the back corner and people will climb them. Taxing fatty food is all very well but no substitute for encouraging people to actually exercise.
Now excuse me, I'm off to walk to the supermarket at the top of the hill. It's my personal way of excusing the unhealthy food I'll buy from them. It works too, my bodyfat is falling in spite of pizza and cake.
If people might break a leg when they go skiing, at least they had the fun of fresh air and exercise, so the risk they endured was in return for a profit they experienced.
If people die of heart disease because they ate the foods they enjoyed, that too is a risk experienced for a benefit they had.
So both these things are really non-issues, except for keeping NHS costs down, and the proportion of young men fit to conscript for war up.
When a factory owner gets rich by belching smoke into the sky, and other people die of lung cancer because of it, that is an injustice, because a risk is imposed on other people for one person's profit.
Terrorism is also a risk inflicted on us for the terrorists' agenda, so it is a big issue in exactly the way that fat is not.
Except: some people are fat because they have to eat high-calorie snacks at jobs they take long bus rides to get to in order to keep alert for long days of work; so there are ways to work on the fat problem that involve regulating work hours, improving public transport, stimulating the economy - so that more people get a regular good night's sleep. So when fat is inflicted on people, work on that.
Finally, after years of being victimised as a smoker (from a bunch of whiners that are chicken shit of cancer and heart disease) we have a new devil.
So I demand equal protection. If I can't kill people by smoking in their faces, I don't want to be the victim of passive eating.
You know how it is. You do the right thing, a bowl of bran cardboard mixed with white water some people call fat-free milk and when you get to work some bastard is eating a bacon butty. Before you know it you're on a full English breakfast with a side of lard cake and pint of warm grease to wash it down.
So huzzah for the evil fat people, that will wear out our pavements and roads, take up 1 1/2 seats in an airplane and fill up all the hospital beds needed for kids with botulism or whatever it is they catch these days.
I can once again have a fag in the office and no one will care, because they'll be too busy poking the fat guy with pointed sticks. Hah, they might even blame the cancer and heart disease I give them on the fat bastard too.
I have been flying (and expanding my carbon footprint) since the sixties, and in all of that time have never been hijacked by a terrorist or even mildly irritated by one. I have, however, been lucky? enough to have sat next to a number of lardy arsed passengers, who lately are more often than not British. They have contributed far more toward my UNwellbeing than terrorists have so far, a terrorist has never sat next to me on a long haul flight to San Francisco for 14 hours and farted in my general direction whilst sweating on me and threatening to overwhelm the fundamental structure of both his seat and mine, but a lardy arsed Brit has.
Detain them for 42 days on a minimal diet of bread and water.
Did I tell you by the way, about the restaurant around the corner ? 6€ for a big, fresh ground beef burger with bacon and cheese and a fried egg, MMMMMM dinner!
My question is, how do you define unhealthy? What food stuffs are currently deemed "safe" by the nutritionists?
You could say that Diet Cola is safer than Cola, as there's none of that nasty fattening sugar in it. However, you in Diet Cola instead of sugar you get those wonderful preservatives (which I'm sensitive to), and a truckload of artificial sweeteners, many of which seem to be of debateable safety.
Personally I'd rather risk a slight increase in tooth decay and weight, both of which are easy and cheap to solve; rather than say brain or stomach cancers, which are far harder to diagnose and both unpleasant and expensive to treat.
Funny, children are going to be so fat they will all die before their parents, next minute size zero models are criticised for setting a bad example. A minute later there is an impending world food shortage and we are all going to starve, and now we are back to dying from being fat again.
The real danger is death by prolonged immersion in bullshit.....
Since anyone's risk of dying at the hands of "The Terrorists" is infinitesimal compared to an everyday hazard like , for instance, choking to death while drinking a beverage, of course <put latest scare here)> is always more dangerous than terrorists, sheesh!
That's the government checking my pockets for terrorists over there.
"ID cards and 42-day detention without trial - two highly unpopular strategies, which will probably be repealed when the Tories get in at the next election"
AAAAAAAAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAHA
HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA
HAHAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA etc etc.
Are you for real? If Maggie had thought for one secont she could have gotten away with doing that to union members & Irishmen back in the day, she'd have been all over it. You *really* think that the Tories won't just let these lunatics do all this nasty stuff for them so they don't have to bother, and then waltz in for their turn shafting you, me and everyone else? Cameron and his nasty, venal public schoolboy chums won't make it better you know. That's not what they got into politics *for*...
Gilbert you beat me to it - Almost exactly the post I was going to make (admittedly with a bit less gloating).
ID Cards and 42 days without trial are very much Tory-style policies. They only oppose them because they are in opposition, so what else are they going to do? Obviously when they come to power they will find reasons they cannot undo them and blame it all on the previous government.
I'm really depressed by people that think everything will change if the Conservatives come to power. I can only assume that these people are either too young or too senile to remember what a conservative government is really like. Let me spell it out for you - exactly the same as the one we have now. New labour beat the tories by becoming the tories. In doing so they have destroyed the balance in British politics.
I am not a socialist, or for that matter a conservative or a liberal - I believe that party politics is at best a flawed but workable system. However it only really works if you have balance. You need a left wing party that gets a decent share of the vote to balance out the right and vice-versa. As long as there is political balance of this type and no one party has an overwhelming majority in the house, the system works.
However New Labour screwed it all up by switching sides.
We now have two right wing parties and nothing on the left to balance them out (as frankly you can't count the lib dems as any kind of serious counterweight).
They have stuck us in exactly the same situation as the US where voters only have two right wing parties to choose from - Oh the republicans portray the democrats as hippy lefties or liberals, but they are very nearly as right wing as our conservative party - It's just that the republicans are much more right wing than that!
So basically we are in a similar situation to the US and new labour and the conservatives will just switch around every so often - Each side will stay in power until they make a complete balls of it, then will get voted out, the others will come in, do all the same stuff until the next huge cock-up then it's time to switch again and so on. It's all so bloody depressing.
I was having a poo a little while ago pondering on the subject of death, and came to the conclusion that we should ban bad luck.
I mean, I know old people who eat lard and smoke 40 a day, but they're like 70 and perfectly happy with life.
Where as I know of people who've died at 45 becouse of various nasty lung diseases.
Some people, drive like psychos everyday, and never crash, whilst some other poor shmuck loses grip for a moment and bang dead as a dodo.
All we can do is slightly adjust the numbers in our favour, but at the end of the day it's just dumb luck as to whether we live or die.
Kind of funny really.
The distiction between "healthy" and "unhealthy" will be entirely arbitrary and based on the nutritional content of someone's idea of a standard portion. (For instance, the rules on advertising "junk food" in children's TV programmes actually forbid adverts for cheese, due to the fact that it contains too much saturated fat. That's the sort which *doesn't* have an evil twin trans-stereoisomer, by the way.)
Anyway, wherever the line may be drawn, it *will* creep, slowly and inexorably, until eventually *all* foodstuffs are taxed -- which is the real goal behind the demonisation of obesity. Of course, people may still be able to evade the food tax by growing their own: so expect a smear campaign against home-growing anytime soon -- possibly culminating with a nationwide outbreak of some virulent plant disease, eventually being traced to some poor sod's vegetable patch. Or maybe just a heavily-hyped TV series about exactly that scenario.
Home-growing of food probably won't be banned altogether, but it almost certainly will be controlled and bureacratised to the point where it becomes impracticable; getting the necessary licence for an allotment (assuming they haven't all had one- and two-bedroom luxury apartments built on them) will be a nightmare of paperwork (unless, of course, you submit your details online; via a government website designed to work only with a two-service-pack-old version of Internet Exploder and running on a temperamental server apparently hanging off a shared dial-up connection).
Why is it that every time the more rotund among us that they may, possibly, maybe, perhaps it's at least their part in part they all go monkey poo??? I used to be on the chunky side (19 stone) and I now cycle 20 miles a day. If I can do it anyone can.
I find stopping smoking hard but gad blast it I shall do it and soon. it's all about effort and willpower. If being dissed for being fat bothers you that much, do something about it! It annoys the heck out of me that people who CAN do something about something they are 'descriminated against' for complain more than those who can't change their descriminating characteristic/s!!
Simpul!
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