WHY THE SUGAR TAX WON’T STOP PEOPLE GETTING FAT

• ZOE STRIMPEL

7 JULY 2019
Telegraph UK

Obesity is the new smoking – but is it a choice?

One of my favourite pastimes at the Ladies Pond on Hampstead Heath is ogling the other women’s bodies. While there are a startling number of born bikini models, there are other types of bodies here, too, and of all ages, ranging from the shapely and plump to the downright enormous.

My advice to those who were outraged last week at Boris Johnson’s idea of reconsidering ‘sin taxes’ on fatty and sugary food (and at health secretary Matt Hancock’s support for doing so) is this: spend a few summer afternoons at the Ladies Pond. You will soon see that whether a milkshake is £2 or £3 is a weird thing to obsess about.

The Pond’s meadow, you see, presents a magical scene of vast numbers of near-naked women picnicking. Pay close attention to what the women are eating, as I do, and you see that it rarely maps onto body type.

Almost to a woman, the sveltest and youngest are on the Doritos, beers, ice creams and an array of salty and sugary snacks. Older women tend to eat more healthily – there is more Tupperware salad and tabbouleh. But this is the case whether the women are fat or thin.

Ladies Pond sunbathers are a relatively prosperous group, with resources and inclination to hoik their way over Hampstead Heath and sit in a glade munching snacks in their swimsuits of an afternoon. We are constantly told that obesity is an obvious extension of poverty, but let me tell you: even the prosperous of north London can be chunky, sometimes dangerously so.

I get why policymakers are increasingly anxious about obesity, and desperate to make fat the new fags. Cancer Research UK said last week that obesity is now causing four types of cancer (bowel, kidney, ovarian and liver) at a greater rate than smoking, partly because obese Britons now outnumber smokers two to one.

Meanwhile, though smoking remains the number one lifestyle killer in the UK, figures released last week by Public Health England show that smoking in England has hit a new low. Only 14.4 per cent of adults in England smoke, down from 14.9 per cent the previous year, and there are 2m fewer smokers now than in 2011 (partly thanks to millennials shunning tobacco). The impulse, therefore, is to do what we did for smoking to fatty foods.

But this is silly. Food is not the same as fags, or indeed petrol or booze or other baddies we might want to tax for social reasons. Cigarettes directly cause cancer – worse, they are bad for those nearby. So is over-consumption of petrol. And so is booze – as anyone who has been in a vomit-soaked, violent and out of control town centre of a Saturday night will know all too well.

Consumption of sweets is a private activity that has no short-term bearing on anyone else. Much ire was roused last week when Boris mentioned protecting the price of milkshakes, but one doesn’t suffer from ice cream fumes. Whereas a regular habit of a smoking, even in moderation, is bad for you, one can live a perfectly healthy life having a piece of cake a day or a pizza every few days.

Germany and Scandinavia are full of slender young women who follow a lunch of meat, potatoes and veg with a large piece of cake. My grandfather, at 95, ate salami every day, and a piece of cake when he fancied it. All the other people I know in their 90s – especially those born in Europe – are regular cake-eaters.

I’m not doubting the relationship between diet and size, but it’s not the whole story – not by a long chalk. Fiddling around with the price of milkshakes is a silly exercise that hugely misses the point of why people get fat – and why some are just thin, whatever they eat. For a start, genes play an important part in determining body weight, and their involvement in the development of obesity is thought to be between 40 and 70 per cent.

Scientists recently identified a mutation in a gene meant to control the hunger hormone and believe this is contributing to an increasingly fat world, or ‘globesity’, the new technical term.

Genes take you only so far, of course, and it’s clear that overdoing it on a daily basis, plus lack of vigorous exercise, is the problem. But sin taxes are not the answer, because the real reason people scoff junk isn’t because it’s cheap – vegetables and even some fish are cheap. It’s because biscuits and cheesy bakes, like milkshakes and pizza, taste absolutely lovely and often carry associations with comfort security and love.

There are chemical reasons for overdoing it: sugary, carby foods offer an immediate dopamine boost, and so can be a powerful temporary soother – that same squirt of dopamine also makes them addictive.

But it’s the craving for comfort, respite and pleasure, however short-term, that’s at the root of the over-eating. Reducing the causes of severe weight gain a question of a quid here or there is childish, superficial and a classic example of a nannying impulse that prefers to wag the finger than get at the heart of why people sin in the first place.