Browse Sections

• Education
• Special reports

Gravy train for all? Fat chance

Miles Skinner
16/ 7/2008

MILES AROUND (16 July) - ONE rule for the spherical, another for the smoking.

Not long after a survey of medics announced they felt that treating smokers should be just about the lowest priority of the NHS comes news that the fat are supping from a new state-sponsored gravy train. Obese families are to be sent to fit camps at the expense of the NHS.

The scheme is to be ‘rolled out’ in Rotherham, involving more than 2,000 fat families from an area where 60 percent of the population is palpably porcine. In fact, 600 locals weigh over 25 stone.

They will join others attending a slimming school every Saturday for three months and be taught how to exercise and cook healthy meals. Nothing that they won’t know from watching every food and daytime TV programme as they munch away on their suffering sofas.

Well fine - all well and good. Obesity-related illness, after all, costs the Government £7billion annually year in treatments and state benefits.

But why then be quite so snotty about smokers?

We all know smoking is bad for health. But there are few who can at the same time have missed the notion that a 40-a-day buffet bar habit is just as bad as Benson and Hedges.

But like the Beatles it seems lardophiles at the NHS do appreciate them being round. As long as it’s butter passing their lips and not butts.

Doctors will be on hand to help in the camps, along with dieticians, physiotherapists and psychologists.

Around 40 of the plumpest participants will be bounced into a six-week scheme at the Carnegie Weight Loss Camp in Leeds....making a meal of it at £3,250-a-head.

Some with chronic weight problems – who have tried to slim for years and failed – will receive surgical treatments such as the gastric band.

Rotherham NHS public health chief Carol Weir said: “For the first time we’ve decided to make obesity our priority as it is a major health burden.“These obesity figures are shocking but the people in the town want to do something about it.

“This level of investment is long overdue. You just have to walk down a street anywhere in Britain to see there’s a problem. But people cannot do it alone. They need help from the NHS.”

Obesity expert Professor Paul Gately, of Leeds Metropolitan University, called the scheme visionary.

Yes, the NHS tackles smoking in all forms too, but at the same time as constantly threatening to withdraw the addicts from various procedures because they keep reaching for the fags.

The fat, however, can have their cake and eat it.

First class seat

ON the subject of ballooning in your armchair, American Kent Couch has made aviation history in a truly magnificent flying machine.

The 48-year-old enthusiast made a 235-mile trip in an armchair supported by a cluster of party balloons filled with helium. He flew over the Oregon desert with a cup of coffee, using a GPS system and an airgun to pop the balloons to control his elevation.

“If I had the time and money, I’d do this every weekend,” he said.

The most amusing part of the story is the case from which the new craze of armchair ballooning was inspired.

In 1982, Los Angeles man Larry Walters was fined $1,500 for violating air traffic rules...in his deck chair.

Pet hate of the week ...

iPod-plugged-MSN-addicted-mobile-phone-twittering-California-wannabeing-fame-expecting-endlessly-boohing silly little girls.

Even as young as ten, girls are suffering stress and anxiety as they struggle with the demands to keep up with their simpering peers, according to a new poll.

One in five falls angry or sad, according to the mental health foundation, because they must wear the right clothes, have the right accessories, and be tuned in to all the best new means of communication for those they will meet in the Trafford Centre in five minutes to do nothing.

The organisation’s Dr Andrew McCulloch blamed adults for creating a world of materialism and premature sexualisation.

He said: “Girls and young women are being forced to grow up at an unnatural pace.”

Four-hundred girls were surveyed and half knew someone who has suffered depression, while two-fifths knew a person who has self-harmed. A third had a friend with an eating disorder and two in five knew someone who had panic attacks.

I suppose it is adults who create programmes about being the next supermodel and rich glamorous people from Orange County, but it’s not as if aspiring to Hollywood icons is a new thing. Nor has shopping only just become something girls like doing.

It’s the pathetic ‘this is the world to me, Simon’ desperation that is the sad new phenomenon.

Could it be that parents are getting lazier at hardening up their children? Is it because Brat Camp can’t compete in the ratings with X-Factor?

Call 0894-rip-off on your pink call phone, because...

The views in this column are those of the writer and not necessarily those of the editor, or the Stockport Express.