It was, as I am sure you noticed, World Obesity Day last Monday. World Days are surprisingly common. The United Nations has about 200 of them, starting with World Braille Day on January 4 and finishing the year with the International Day of Epidemic Preparedness on December 27.
But World Obesity Day is not one of the UN ones, it is an unofficial, or less official, offering from the World Obesity Federation. No, I had never heard of it either.
In fact it is a bit of a mystery why World Obesity Day qualified for a decent third of a page feature in the Standard from the agile pen of Adelyn Lau. There was no recognition in the paper of World Wildlife Day, which was the day before. Well all right they don’t print on a Sunday, but March 1 passed with no mention of the fact that it was in fact two Days: World Seagrass Day and Zero Discrimination Day.
Similarly, Tuesday’s International Day for Disarmament and Non-proliferation Awareness passed unremarked, as far as I could see. Perhaps tomorrow will attract some coverage; it’s International Women’s Day.
Personally I found the idea of a World Obesity Day somewhat confusing. Presumably on World Seagrass Day one consumes, or cultivates seagrass. According to the government website there are some seagrass beds in Hong Kong “but they are generally small and sporadic”.
And I suppose on World Press Freedom day one pursues or cultivates press freedom, which is also, in Hong Kong, a bit small and sporadic these days.
In the light of these thoughts it is tempting to suppose that the appropriate way for a conscientious citizen to mark World Obesity Day would be to go out for a double cheeseburger with extra fries. But of course this is wrong. Some World Days are about things you should avoid, like Violent Extremism as and when Conducive to Terrorism (February 12) or Illegal, Unregulated or Unreported Fishing (June 5).
Anyway, to return to obesity, I did notice a certain lack of balance in Ms Lau’s otherwise fluent feature. Those interviewed all turned out to be officials, or the founder, of the Hong Kong branch of the World Obesity Federation. A picture showed all these sources together, looking admirably trim. Unsurprisingly they all had different way of saying the same thing: that obesity should be avoided at all costs.
It is no doubt true that obesity has been “associated” with up to 224 diseases, and the overweight are likely to be over also in measurements of blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar. Clearly people who are very overweight have a problem.
And yet… Is it really true, as the Department of Health data says, that 55 per cent of the population of Hong Kong are either overweight or obese? That is more than half. I am sure I am not the only person who does not, in ordinary everyday encounters with Hongkongers, find that more than half of the people I meet are overweight or, as we used to say before euphemisms became compulsory, fat.
One also wonders, with all due respect to the pure motives of the local obesity fan club, whether stirring up anxiety about people’s weight is really such a good idea. It risks tossing many people with a minor, or no, problem into the slavering maw of a large and greedy industry, which makes its money out of people’s desire to lose weight.
As Stuart Richie points out (in “Science Fictions”) it is really hard to draw firm conclusions from research into the effects of diets, and vested interests are happy to push dodgy conclusions out to unsuspecting consumers.
It seems also that medical opinion is increasingly sceptical about the value of badgering people to lose weight. Dr Joshua Wolrich (in “Food isn’t Medicine”) argues that people’s ‘natural weight’ varies enormously and simple formulae used to measure whether you are overweight are not actually very helpful.
People who really eat more than they need, he suggests, are responding to personal or medical problems; the over-eating is a symptom and the cure is to solve the underlying problem.
Meanwhile it is important to foster in everyone a ‘healthy attitude to food’. Otherwise, for every middle-aged man saved from heart disease by dedicated dieting there will be an adolescent, probably but not invariably female, tipped into eating disorders by over-anxiety about the effect of food on her health and appearance.
Well no doubt there are no easy answers to these questions. In my experience losing weight is hard, but not impossible. One does not get much help from the environment, which constantly offers delicious but fattening temptations. It is perhaps time for the United Nations to consider critically the existence of its International Day of Potato (May 30).
tim's experiment 