We are NOT to blame for being OBESE, claims health expert

I DON'T know exactly what qualifies as a "superhuman effort" but when I hear that phrase I tend to picture someone who has dived into a freezing lake to save a child or lifted a heavy car off a crushed cyclist. I don't think of someone who refuses an extra helping of pudding.

It takes a 'superhuman effort' to resist fatty burgers says an Oxford professorGETTY - POSED

It takes a 'superhuman effort' to resist fatty burgers says an Oxford professor

In the mind of the Government's health tsar Susan Jebb, however, that mere act is sufficient to elevate someone to the status of Batman, Spiderman or some other fantasy hero. "Obesity has increased greatly over the last few decades," she said last week.

"That is not a national collapse of willpower. It's something about our environment that has changed. You need in some cases a superhuman effort to reduce your food intake."

It is not our fault if we get fat, she asserts. We should blame those dastardly food companies and retailers who line the high streets with burger shops and put sweets next to the tills. 


Susan Jebb, health tsar

How can we be expected to walk past such temptation without succumbing? I don't doubt that some people find it harder than others to know when to stop eating. However there is ultimately only one cause of obesity: not slow metabolism, not faulty genes but eating too much.

Unless you are being force-fed like a goose bred for paté de foie gras it is entirely within your control to monitor what you eat. Virtually all packaged food now comes with details of calorific content so it is not too hard to work out if you are exceeding a sensible daily intake of food.

If Jebb, who also serves as professor of diet and population health at the University of Oxford, thinks we can't be expected to have the willpower to turn down sugary snacks, from what else does she think we should be absolved: drinking too much, taking drugs, shoplifting, groping women on the Tube, hitting people we don't like? Civilised life becomes utterly impossible if we are not expected to exercise willpower and control our behaviour. Exercising selfrestraint is not superhuman, it is just human.

THE trouble is, it isn't only Jebb who seems to have this view of humans as pathetic creatures who bear no responsibility for their own actions. It has now become the ruling philosophy of many policy-makers and do-gooders.

In 2013 the American Medical Association voted to classify obesity as a disease against the advice of an expert panel that had warned of the consequences.

Obesity has increased greatly over the last few decadesGETTY - POSED

Obesity has increased greatly over the last few decades

As one disgusted doctor put it, "If restaurants are offering high-caloric items on the menu does that open the door for people to sue? Are people going to start taking time off work and claiming disability just because they are obese?" She had hardly spoken before the EU Court of Justice, ruling in a case over a 25-stone Danish child minder who had lost his job after being unable to perform basic tasks, decided that obesity is a disability and that employers could be guilty of discrimination if they dismiss people who are too fat to do the job.

The possibility that the child minder might have improved his performance at work - as well as his health - by losing weight didn't seem to come into it.

Then there are drugs. Last week the Today programme carried an interview with a lawyer convicted of supplying his 18-year-old boyfriend with the drugs which cost him his life.

Rather than treat it as a moral issue the interview treated drugs as if they were some disease sweeping through the gay community and which drug-users were powerless to prevent. It has become a received wisdom among metropolitan liberals: that users of illicit drugs are passive victims. Drug-taking is not a disease - it is a human behaviour. There are genuine victims of drugs: toddlers who come across their parents stash of ecstasy pills or passers-by gunned down in battles between drugs gangs.

But adults who fall ill or die after choosing to take dangerous drugs are victims of nothing but their own stupidity.

It will not be long before we have sex offenders getting off court cases on the grounds that they are suffering from sex addiction and can't possibly be expected to control their urges.

Claiming victimhood did not work for former Sunderland footballer Adam JohnsonGETTY

Claiming victimhood did not work for former Sunderland footballer Adam Johnson

Thankfully claiming victimhood did not work for Sunderland footballer Adam Johnson, jailed for a sexual relationship with a 15-yearold girl. But his legal team had a try. He was described in court as "hyper sexual" - a dreadful affliction, no doubt, where the sufferer experiences uncontrollable urges.

You think it is far-fetched that anyone should think sex addiction a disease? In 2012 a French court awarded a man compensation on the grounds that a drug prescribed to him had turned him into a "gay sex addict". In 2013 a US lawyer tried to sue Apple on the grounds that the computer company was to blame for his porn addiction by failing to install a programme to filter out adult material.

Gambling is going the same way. In 2004 an Austrian man who lost £1.68million on a betting spree was awarded £336,000 damages against two casinos on the grounds that they had done nothing to protect him from his own gambling habit.

HIS LAWYER argued that "compulsive gambling is an illness that is very hard to treat". What, I wonder, would have happened had he won a million? Somehow I don't think he would have claimed to be suffering from a disease, then.

Rather, I think he would have spent the money and enjoyed himself. All that was achieved by awarding him damages was to turn his gambling into a one-way bet: if he wins he takes the winnings, if he loses he gets compensation.

I don't want compulsive gamblers, drug-takers or obese people to be denied help. They have a problem which needs to be dealt with. But you don't tackle compulsions and addictions by telling people they are suffering from a disease over which they have no control. The only way you are going to tackle this kind of thing is by getting people to face up to their problem and put in a position where they want to do something to tackle it.

People who eat too much need to exercise their will power, not told that they can't be expected to have any. It is depressing to think we are all paying for an "obesity tsar" to encourage fat people to blame others for their misfortune.

Sometimes I think it is not just the British public which is carrying too much weight - it is our government apparatus, too. We would have a far healthier country if it were slimmed down and all these tsars, advocates and national champions dismissed.

The question is, does the Government have the willpower to point out the blindingly obvious: that if you eat too much you will then become fat?