Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
No issue highlights the schizophrenic nature of modern-day scaremongering better than body image. The ease with which the expert classes flit between panicking about obesity and panicking about thinness, between sneering at disgusting corpulent people and fretting over sickly super-skinny people, is extraordinary. What these weight-obsessed panic merchants never stop to consider is that perhaps these two alleged body crises are related ? perhaps if there really is a problem of body image today, particularly among young girls, and particularly in the direction of wanting to be ultra thin, it could be a consequence of officialdom's own relentless depiction of being chubby or porky as the worst thing in the whole world.
Today, confirming that doctors have replaced priests as the shrill decreers of how human beings should live, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges has published a 10-point plan to tackle Britain's status as "the fat man of Europe". In the name of eliminating fatness for once and for all, it wants to slap a 20 per cent sin tax on fizzy drinks, ban junk-food ads on TV before 9pm, reduce the number of fast-food outlets near schools, and have GPs interrogate every podgy person who enters their surgery about their lifestyles. The mostly positive media coverage of this hectoring, ban-happy, authoritarian crusade against wobbly bits is decorated with those horrible stock photographs of anonymous fat people waddling through the street, while (thin) commentators implore the government to create an Obesity Tsar, an ideally rake-skinny, burger-dodging do-gooder who might help save the fat from themselves and their larders.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/b...an-state-sanctioned-bullying-of-fat-children/
Today, confirming that doctors have replaced priests as the shrill decreers of how human beings should live, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges has published a 10-point plan to tackle Britain's status as "the fat man of Europe". In the name of eliminating fatness for once and for all, it wants to slap a 20 per cent sin tax on fizzy drinks, ban junk-food ads on TV before 9pm, reduce the number of fast-food outlets near schools, and have GPs interrogate every podgy person who enters their surgery about their lifestyles. The mostly positive media coverage of this hectoring, ban-happy, authoritarian crusade against wobbly bits is decorated with those horrible stock photographs of anonymous fat people waddling through the street, while (thin) commentators implore the government to create an Obesity Tsar, an ideally rake-skinny, burger-dodging do-gooder who might help save the fat from themselves and their larders.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/b...an-state-sanctioned-bullying-of-fat-children/