The increasing number of people, including children, who are overweight, is a great source of misery and causes various health problems. The really sad fact is that this problem is largely caused by government policy, and certainly could be eased by govenment action. If you are overweight, it’s almost certainly not your fault. I will explain.

First one simple fact. Up untill 1970 or therabouts very few people were overweight. So if you could eat exactly like English people ate in the 1950’s or 1960’s you would gradually come down to a normal weight, with very few exceptions.

It requires govenment action though for this even to be possible. Take a simple thing like milk. When I was a milkman in the early 1970’s most people still drank full cream pasteurised milk in a glass bottle. This would have come from mainly fresian cows, fed mailnly on grass and hay. The premium product was Channel Island milk because it had more cream. The people who drank it weren’t overweight. I looked recently for jobs as a milkman to get an idea of how wages have changed since decimilasion and was shocked to see that all the offers were not jobs as such, but some sort of franchise arrangement. Nowadays most milk is in cartons, reduced fat and homoginesed and comes from high yielding cows.