People will get thinner only when they have things that are worth staying thin for - self-esteem, social status and jobs

The Guardian

It's an old story - trace it back to the poor laws. The middle classes like to worry about the morals, health and drag on public expenditure of the poor. Horrendous projections for what obesity will cost the NHS naturally worry taxpayers forking out to fill hospital beds with poor fat folk.

True, many of us middle classes are overweight, but most of the dangerously obese - the 22% with a body-mass index in the red zone - are to be found carless on council estates and not in the leafy suburbs where kids are driven to school in supertanker 4x4s. It is poor children at most risk of swelling up like balloons, in danger of losing limbs and eyesight to diabetes as they grow up. It's wrong to talk about "fat cats" when the privileged are usually thin and sleek with bodies well-exercised by gyms and personal trainers on diets of radicchio and sparkling water.

Kinder experts look for sympathetic reasons why the poor are fat and unhealthy. Fresh fruit and vegetables are so expensive, they say. There is no transport to get from estates to the good food shops. Poor women are too hard-pressed to have time to cook proper family meals, so they snack. It's hard for poor children to exercise in dangerous concrete jungles, with no cars to take them to ballet and judo lessons. Or maybe, sadly, these people just don't know what's good for them.

All these may be contributory factors. The uneducated may not read small print on deliberately incomprehensible food labels to detect the difference between kJ and kcal. Unlike neurotic middle-class mothers, they may not follow every scare about tartrazine and GM or dream up hypochondriacal allergies for lack of anything else to worry about in what is, remember, the safest and healthiest time ever.

So why are the poor getting dangerously fat? They are mainly a little better off and food has got cheaper. They are not ignorant. Every woman alive has spent her life obsessing over body size, perusing every diet in magazines and daytime TV shows. Never has there been more information about what food is fattening and what is not. Public health advice is puny beside this great surfeit of diet and fitness info.

What's more, these messages are vigorously reinforced by every fashion and celeb page telling us thin is beautiful, fat is horrible. Tabloids spend fortunes on paparazzi snaps of some celeb on the beach who has "let herself go". Star-cellulite-in-bikini is worth as much as star-in-illicit-love-nest. Fergie fat or thin is regular fare. No child needs to be told fat is bad when right from nursery school it's the fat kids that get tormented for being slow, ugly and undesirable - often reinforced by teachers who see them as losers, too. From Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Harry Potter, heroes are skinny and lithe, while nasty children are fat porkers. Who doesn't want to look more like Posh than Roseanne?

So what's gone wrong? Most of us wrestle with food, torn between denial and desire, between fridge and gym, eating and regretting. It is very hard and girth grows by the decade. Most people I know live in a Bridget Jones cycle of boom and bust with the weighing scales. But mostly the middle class stays the right side of dangerously obese. In the highest echelons, those superthin lettuce-eaters Tom Wolfe calls the social x-rays know that thinness radiates high status, as surely as bound feet did in old China. "You can't be too rich or too thin," said Dorothy Parker.

But fat means poor and out of control. People who feel they have no control over their own lives give up. What's there to struggle and make sacrifices for? No job, no prospects, no point. A little of what you fancy compensates for life's big disappointments. So drinking and smoking and eating the wrong things become small treats in desolate lives. Being out of control becomes a mindset ever harder to climb out of. No job becomes no status, no hope and, rapidly, unemployable semi-despair, whatever the job market out there.

Poor children at school know their low status from the day they walk in. The little girl with perfect kit, sparkly trainers and lovely lunchbox is always admired over the shabby kid who never went to ballet and only had a packet of Wotsits for breakfast. The rest of us have very good social incentives not to give in to temptation - and even then often fail - but those who have nothing easily give up.

The traditional middle-class reaction is to teach poor mothers how to become better managers; a family can eat healthily on very little, they opine. See how low-paid vicars bring up their broods on a pittance. Though when I recently tried living on the minimum wage, even without children, I found I couldn't manage, counting every penny and eating nothing but lentils, rice, potatoes, pasta, cabbage and oranges. It's a miserable, life-denying way to eat, but that's not the point. Even with more money, the poor would probably eat themselves into an early grave if there was not much else to live for. Why defer gratification if there isn't going to be any compensating gratification?

It is inequality and disrespect that makes people fat: obesity took off 25 years ago, up 400% in the years when inequality has exploded. People will only get thinner when they are included in things that are worth staying thin for. Offer self-esteem, respect, jobs or some social status and the pounds would start to fall away.

The inequality/obesity link is mirrored internationally. America has by far the most unequal society and by far the fattest. Britain and Australia come next. Europe is better and the Scandinavian countries best of all. No doubt there are also social policy reasons for this: the best social democracies pick up family problems earliest and offer most support, putting people back on their feet, preventing social exclusion. But the narrower the status and income gap between high and low, the narrower the waistbands.

Of course, we need tough labelling laws and a ban on advertising junk to children in schools and on TV. It's a disgrace that there are virtually no safe cycle lanes in cities. Every school needs great dance, aerobics, sport and fun in after-school clubs. It's shocking the government is so craven about controlling the excesses of the food and drinks industry. But let's not fool ourselves: only a genuine drive towards a society that doesn't leave out a quarter of its citizens will send the bathroom scales tipping in the right direction.