Lard Arses
Janet Street-Porter is a former newspaper editor who is known for her straight talking manner and I agree with this no punches pulled comment piece in The Independent in which Janet lambasts the idea that public money should be used to pay people to try and lose weight.
Like all such barmy ideas they come from people who are trying to turn something which is a good idea like losing weight into a cottage industry, as if people can achieve things in their life without any personal commitment or effort.
If you ask me it's as barmy as paying smokers to give up cigarettes, even though they make a huge financial saving simply by cutting down or stopping smoking altogether.
Why on earth is the cash-strapped NHS threatening to pay Slimming World to make a nation of lard arses slightly thinner?
By Janet Street-Porter - The Independent
Nice wants our financially strapped NHS to fund 12-week weight-loss courses
Almost one in three women in the UK is overweight – higher than anywhere else in Western Europe. We’ve become a nation of lard arses, with two-thirds of all adults classed as tubby. The combined bodyweight of TV’s Goggleboxers gives a pretty good snapshot of the problem. But is it the state’s job to attempt to halt this tidal wave of British blubber?
If we want to eat ourselves to an early grave, why not? Predictably, Nanny State has decided to intervene, decreeing we must be nudged into changing our sinful ways while some of us can still manage to get up from the sofa. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence has responded with another of its controversial pronouncements – it already decides which cancer drugs will be available on the NHS and who is eligible for treatment, decisions which cause huge distress and anxiety (it’s rejected the funding for two-thirds of new cancer drugs since 2007), and now it’s turned its attention to fatties.
Nice wants our financially strapped NHS to fund 12-week weight-loss courses, run by organisations including Weight Watchers and Slimming World, both of which (by the way) have profit as their ultimate goal. This plan will cost about £50 a head, and there’s absolutely no way of guaranteeing or measuring success. Nice says GPs should discuss weight loss with their patients “in a respectful and non-judgemental way”, and if someone’s BMI (body mass index) exceeds 30 they should be offered free slimming courses, costing from £6 to £10 a week.
There’s little chance it will make any difference. Organisations like Weight Watchers work because members pay for themselves. Like alcoholics and drug abusers, they are turning up only because they have reached rock bottom and are mentally ready to change their ways. Overeating is an addiction like any other, and success relies on being in a supportive group of fellow sufferers.
Nice reckons “lifestyle management”, as it puts it, would save the NHS money even if our collective weight is reduced by just 1 per cent, because heart disease and so on would drop. Given that two-thirds of us could be eligible for these slimming classes, I reckon they’d achieve exactly the same result by just burning money.
The only way to change eating habits is by teaching primary school pupils how to cook at least 10 dishes, along with classes on nutrition. These could be entertaining, and enlighten kids about geography and biology, and give them social skills. Leave the current generation of fatties to their fate, and focus all attention on shaping a new mindset with the very young, as part of the national curriculum, not a bit of hastily thought-out policy that smacks of desperation.
The Government fails to deal with sugar levels in food, and won’t impose minimum pricing for booze, so giving us a few vouchers for Weight Watchers is as useful as a balsa wood boat in a storm. I wish the Government didn’t want to “save” people. The latest election results show it has far bigger problems to solve.
