Where is the information and action to fight the obesity epidemic?

To listen to the World Health Organisation, you would think that Ireland was going to sink into the sea by the year 2030, under the sheer weight of its growing population of fatties. Allowing for a degree of hyperbole, though, the rich-world epidemic of obesity is real, in the sense that it is upon us already, and far from a laughing matter. In this country it will add to the already inexorable demands on the NHS from a population living longer, or rather living longer in poorer health, kept going by astonishingly effective – and expensive – new treatments for the ills of modern life, including cholesterol-clogged arteries and type 2 diabetes. Fully one-third of British women are forecast to be obese in 2030, compared with about one-quarter now. At the same time, paradoxically, anorexia and bulimia are running at historically high levels. Food seems to have become more of a pain than a pleasure for us, life-threatening, not life-enhancing.