Obesity

A storm of controversy has been brewing in the US. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say the storm has been dipped in oil and deep fried.  Twice.

At the centre of the controversy is a series of ads aimed at tackling the growing obesity crisis in American children.

In one of the ads (above) a young girl stares forlornly into the camera and says: “I don’t like going to school because all the other kids pick on me. It hurts my feelings.”

Another opens with the statistic that 75 per cent of parents of overweight children ignore the problem growing before their very eyes. It’s followed by a scene in which an obese boy sits facing his equally obese mother and asks, “Mum, why am I fat?”. The silence that follows his question is deafening.

Continue reading "Don’t sugarcoat it: If your child is obese, it’s your fault" »

I caught up with a group of old workmates just before Christmas and couldn’t believe my eyes.

In the 12 months since our last festive fizz, they’d all shrunk – and by a sizeable amount.

“I’ve lost 16 kilos,” cried one gleefully.

“Ten!” said another.

“More than 20,” said a third.

Continue reading "Think you can’t keep that resolution? Think again." »

Here’s something to ponder – how many Smarties would you have to eat to become morbidly obese? 1000? Maybe half a million? Or is the consumption of Smarties merely a deadly entrée to a grotesque world of other fattening treats, where we start nibbling away at a small handful of the tiny chocolate sweets and pretty soon are subsisting on a diet of Chiko rolls, McHappy Meals and deep-fried Mars bars?

In the grand scheme of culinary evil I always thought the innocuous Smartie was the least of our concerns. Apparently not, according to the no-fun folks at the Obesity Policy Coalition, who have launched an action against the Smartie-peddlers at Nestle – cue angry boos from the crowd – over an apparently sinister online colouring-in competition which gives kiddies aged three to 10 a chance to win one of 500 Smiggles stationery packs.

The Obesity Policy Coalition complained to the Advertising Standards Board arguing that the Nestle Smarties website breaches the Responsible Children’s Marketing Initiative, introduced in March of this year, to protect the tiny tots from wicked corporate ploys to stuff them full of junk food.

Continue reading "Mmm & mmm. The nanny state can’t have my Smarties" »

You have to hand it to the big multinationals. They know how to get us to eat more fatty food and drink more sugar, even when they claim to be committed to our health and well-being and no one has done it better recently than Coca Cola.

Their latest campaign, which encourages people to seek out a can of regular, full strength, eight teaspoons of sugar per 375ml of soft drink that has their name written on the label, is nothing short of brilliant.

And then, once you have your own can, you can also seek out cans that feature your best mate’s name, or your kids can find one with their name… the list goes on.

Continue reading "Fizzy evil sugar bombs from diabetes hell" »

According to Andy Warhol, everyone has their “15 minutes of fame”. Looking back at four decades of work as a health scientist mine will probably be the development of ‘GutBusters’, the world’s first men’s “waist loss” program in 1991.

GutBusters lasted for over a decade before it was taken over by Weight Watchers and closed down for being unprofitable (men won’t admit to having anything wrong with their health and hence won’t pay for it).

This is despite the fact that it achieved (and still has) world-wide acknowledgement as an ethically-based and economic scientific weight loss program. Those are rare, by the way.

Continue reading "Economic growth is making you really, really fat" »

A recent survey by an international health insurer, which involved 13,000 people from 12 countries, found Australians are world leaders in self denial when it comes to being fat.

Despite 76 per cent of the Australians surveyed believing it is the individual’s responsibility to adopt preventive health measures, the results demonstrated that 60 per cent of those Australians surveyed were overweight or obese.

Continue reading "We’re getting too fat for our coffins" »

When you’re fourteen years old, chubbier than the rest of your friends and desperately unhappy about it, there’s nothing more precious than good self-esteem.

It gives you confidence, improves how you relate to others and boosts your overall sense of happiness. It makes you a better human.

Diets do not help build healthy self-esteem. Ergo, books about diets do not help engender healthy self-esteem. That’s probably why American author Paul Kramer has copped so much flak for his new but yet to be published book, Maggie Goes on A Diet.

Continue reading "Don’t judge this book by its cover" »

Goodbye foie gras, pork belly and the seven stages of degustation. Our “future food”  will be home-grown, seasonal and natural; served informally and with a lot of respect for where it was grown. That’s according to some of the world’s top chefs in the foodie and travel section of The Australian.

Sounds healthy, huh? A meal of organic roast beetroot is a long way from the Jetsons-style microwavable micro foods of our childhood imagination - but will it be worth going out for? If growing something yourself and cooking it simply is all there is to it, we’d be better off staying home and practising our MasterChef skills, right?

It’s Tuesday. What’s on your mind?

Children as young as 10 are at risk of heart disease. Doctors are faced with obese toddlers, and teenagers that weigh up to 200kg. Kids are fat, and getting fatter, and it’s no surprise if they’re guzzling soft drinks and gobbling fast food.

Dr Matt Sabin, from the Royal Children’s Hospital weight management clinic, says: “We’re not talking about a little bit of extra weight, we’re talking about severely obese children”.

The United States and Australia are experiencing a lethal ‘fat crisis’ that is growing steadily worse.

Continue reading "First world problem: Death by fat" »

There are a couple of flippant faux-diagnostic accusations that get thrown about with abandon: “Clearly got Asperger’s” and “That’s child abuse”.

The first gets directed at anyone with a vague difficulty coping in social situations; the second to parents escorting children with issues ranging from mullet hairstyles to a clear case of childhood obesity.

Well, US doctors just upped the ante and suggested that in certain circumstances obese children should be removed from their parents’ calorie-laden care and into a foster family. Dr David Ludwig, from the Children’s Hospital in Boston, and his colleague Lindsey Murtagh from the Harvard School of Public Health, wrote a provocative letter to the American Medical Association journal.

Continue reading "How do you know if you’re abusing your child?" »

Someone I love very much is fat. Really fat. Technically, you’d say he’s morbidly obese, but “morbid” actually means “gruesome” or “being unduly interested in death”, which doesn’t apply to my friend at all. At least, I don’t think it does.

It’s hard to tell, because fat people don’t talk about being fat. Sure, they’re the first to dub themselves “chubster” or “jelly belly”, or “Sir Cumference” or “Lord of the Fries”. But it’s a tactic – much the same way gay people adopted “queer”, thereby cleverly disempowering the homophobes who tried to beat them with it.

It’s as if Roseanne Barr single-handedly silenced the plus-sized world when she said, “So you’re fat? Just be fat and shut up about it.” Well, she is wrong. (And not very funny. Much funnier is Dawn French, who says she’d have been a famous model had she been around when Rubens was painting. Kate Moss? She’d have been the paintbrush.)

Continue reading "All jokes aside, there’s nothing funny about obesity" »

I am the postgraduate dream. I live on minimum wage; I have a flirtatious relationship with the poverty line. However, I think this is a karmic repercussion of my own bad choices. As a younger, less-worldly type I entered into a line of work - dirty, unrewarding work - from which I seem unable to escape: I kill people.

In the beginning it all seemed like good fun. Harmless fun. However, recently the inescapable truth has dawned on me. Hospitality is about killing people. Most of us are all too familiar with government propaganda about the perils of smoking and drinking, two activities frequently central to hospitality.

However, it’s not these which really grate against my sensibilities. It’s the fat that is propelling me towards a nervous breakdown. They haul themselves out of their cubicles and waddle in at least once a week. Very often they appear more frequently, their numbers certainly seem to be growing.

Continue reading "Would you like a heart attack with that, sir?" »

The Australian government is bent on making fat people slim in the most condescending way possible.

Last month, an incredibly juvenile media campaign was launched to encourage Australians to make healthier lifestyle choices.

The “Swap it, Don’t Stop it” campaign is a multimedia extravaganza, featuring television, print and radio ads, an iPhone app and Facebook page.

Continue reading "Big Government talking down to big Australians" »

A cheeseburger, small fries and a triple-thick shake constitutes a McDonald’s Happy Meal in the US and clocks up 1,090 calories, although reassuringly the small plastic toy that’s included in the meal is usually inedible and thus calorie-free.

Leroy Comrie, a Councilman from Queens in New York, blames his portly size of 152kg on scoffing Happy Meals as a child and wants the city to follow in San Francisco’s footsteps by outlawing the toys, in an effort to promote healthier eating habits.

There are undoubtedly many problems with the toys included in Happy Meals - their plastic toxins can’t be great for the environment and they contribute to landfill, plus when Macca’s run out of a certain toy it can lead to a sibling war. But the toys themselves are not responsible for fat kids.

Continue reading "Keep the happy but lose the crappy in happy meals" »

Soaring fuel costs are driving airlines to come up with increasingly novel, and amusing, ways of lightening their loads.

There have been reports of the carriers washing their planes more often to reduce drag, cleaning cabins of dropped coins and cutlery, and even pondering the use of thinner paper in their in-flight magazines to drop weight.

But it’s pretty clear they’re ignoring the elephant in the aircraft here: Fat customers.

Continue reading "Frequent fatties should fork out for their flying" »

It may sound like a risqué sexual manoeuvre, but in fact it’s a burger - KFC have decided to rid a chicken burger of its cumbersome bun – instead of those pesky empty bread calories you now get fried chicken. It’s called the Double Down.

It’s two slabs of fried chicken spooning strips of juicy bacon, cheese, and it’s got almost 2000 kilojoules.  Mmmm… kilojoules.

Cue the righteous disgust from health professionals.

Continue reading "Hold the KFC burger and pass the fried haloumi" »

Something about the Warne/Hurley tryst got right up Peter Costello’s nose last week.

In a rant that first bagged Warne and then slagged the self interest of elite sportsmen, the former Australian Treasurer ultimately suggested that parents should fear AFL-run sports clinics.

“Any right-thinking parent would quake with fear to hear that footballers were coming to their daughter’s school to give a little bit of inspiration,” he wrote.

Now, in the past I’ve been quick to skewer wayward sports stars. But to tar all AFL footballers with a single brush is akin to suggesting all politicians are rednecks because a few on the Right like to parrot the policies of One Nation.

Continue reading "Don’t tar and feather all AFL players" »

Having won its long battle against evil smokers, the Australian Medical Association now wants to implement graphic Quit-style advertisements for fat people showing diseased organs and larger lads drinking litres of liquefied lard before keeling over to die.

This is the thin end of a fat wedge.

Unless they’ve been living under a plus-sized rock, every last big boned person is already well aware of the dramatic social and health implications of being overweight.

Continue reading "Is the obesity epidemic a big, fat beat up?" »

Today we would be shocked if cigarette and alcohol companies targeted their advertising to children.

We would be shocked because the evidence is there to support such outrage. We know that tobacco kills and that alcohol consumption can have grave short-term and long-term health consequences.

So shouldn’t we be equally shocked when our children are targeted for junk food marketing? The evidence is there.

Continue reading "Keep junk food away from our kids" »

The Melbourne Spring Fashion Festival is now in full swing.  In a few days it will coincide with the start of the National Body Image and Eating Disorder Awareness week.

The fashion industry has always come under fire for its use of super-skinny models, raising issues about healthy body images.  In Australia, 45 per cent of women and 23 per cent of men in a healthy weight range believe they are overweight.  Being in a healthy weight range doesn’t make your image perception healthy.

But this argument isn’t new.  And overtime little has been done to correct these issues.  We have heard the calls to ban skinny models from the world’s fashion runways, but they are still walking down the catwalk.

Continue reading "Body image crusaders must avoid normalising obesity" »

If you’re sick of swallowing all the political chatter from Jules and Tony take a break and chew on something meaningful out of America. And it’s not President Obama’s eloquent speech at the White House Ramadan dinner, where he defended plans for a mosque at Ground Zero. Rather, meet Paula Deen, the self-described ‘Queen of Southern Cooking’.

A woman that makes burgers using donuts as buns, lasagna sandwiches and single handedly butchers food to the point that she induces dry retching. The video above involving frozen cheesecake and a large pot of boiling oil should give you a sufficient introduction to Deen’s world.

As she says: “Just when you thought you couldn’t make cheesecake any better!”

Continue reading "US celebrity chef captures hearts, may also stop them" »

The Australian health establishment has denounced a proposal for doctors to stop calling chronically overweight people obese and start calling them fat instead.

The idea is that calling people fat will have more emotional impact, effectively shaming them into doing something about their weight. Sorry to have to point this out but chronically obese people already get called fat, just usually not to their faces. Besides, many overweight people openly talk about themselves being a fat person.

Now the Royal Australian College of GPs says it is a rude and insulting term, preferring “obese” instead because patients should always be treated with respect.

Continue reading "Being harsh on smokers worked, how about the fat?" »

Why is it that when a health care professional informs a morbidly obese man that he should lose some weight, that mans first reaction is to cry ‘discrimination’? 

Where is the prejudice in this situation?  As a society we are practically drowning in information about the inextricable link between being overweight and being unhealthy. If you think three square meals a day can be purchased through a drive-thru window, and that exercise is getting up to change the channel when you’ve lost the remote, then that should remove your right to feel offended when you’re handed an ample helping of the truth. 

If someone who has spent the better part of a decade at medical school learning how to piece you back together if you break, tells you to drop a few kgs, they’re doing it for your own good. 

Continue reading "Overweight people should just get over the criticism" »

The mere proposal in a regional Australian town to ban smoking in its CBD is a sign the decades-long public policy assault on tobacco has succeeded. The Rudd Government introduced a Great Big New Tax on Cigarettes weeks ago to barely a feather of resistance. Attitudes have changed. The war on smoking has been won.

But smokers have been replaced by another group who present a similar public health challenge. They, too, risk dying early. They could be harming their children, are a drag on the economy because of frequent illness, and impose multi-million-dollar healthcare costs on the rest of the healthy community.

They are the overweight and the obese.

Continue reading "A great big new fat tax?" »

With the majority of middle-aged Australians either obese or overweight the direct contribution of their excess fat to poor health outcomes is potentially staggering.

Over the next 20 years it is likely that overweight and obese Australians will experience 700,000 more hospitalisations and 120,000 more deaths related to weight-related diabetes and cardiovascular disease (including heart attacks and strokes) compared to the same population who remain healthy and slim.

The calculated cost to society in terms of health care alone is $6 billion. The cost of losing loved ones and productive members of our society is probably incalculable.

Continue reading "Building healthier bodies can start with healthier towns" »

It’s customary to denounce government ministers for being ineffective but for something different today I’m going to attack the Health Minister Nicole Roxon for being far too effective.

More so than any other frontbencher in this government Roxon appears to have got her way on pretty much everything and, as a result, life has becoming increasingly more irritating for those of us who choose to treat our bodies like a science experiment.

Early last year, when cigarettes cost a paltry $12 a packet, as opposed to the new price of $286 a packet, I had the pleasure of bumping into Ms Roxon in the gardens outside the House of Representatives chamber at Federal Parliament, where I happened to be stubbing out a cigarette in the ashtray. “You don’t have to put that out because of me,” she joked, although there was a vaguely maniacal glint in her eye, as if she was going to finish the sentence by saying: “Yet.”

Continue reading "Roxon, you don’t have to put on the red light" »

All those arguing over which version of history should be contained in the national curriculum might want to think about a subject that could mean our current generation lives long enough to achieve some level of appreciation of that history.

Food is on our minds this week, with the return of MasterChef, which last year many commentators hailed as the saviour of real food in our homes. It’s not you know.

On Friday we were told obesity has overtaken smoking as the leading cause of premature death and illness in Australia. Someone who’s never been taught to boil an egg is hardly about to rush out and snap up the ingredients for a batch of Poh’s dumplings.

Continue reading "Bring back compulsory cooking classes at school" »

Further to last week’s column about the McGriddle – the maple syrup-injected breakfast atrocity which is mercifully only available at Maccas in the US – Australia should brace itself for the arrival of another rogue foodstuff which makes the McGriddle look like an iceberg lettuce.

A group of culinary perverts in the employ of KFC has developed a truly astonishing “sandwich” called the Double Down. It has no bread. Instead, it’s two original recipe chicken breast fillets, with bacon, two types of cheese and the sinister-sounding “colonel’s sauce” sandwiched in between.

The only nice thing you can say about this atrocity is that at least it’s gluten-free. Other than that it’s merely the latest bit of comestible one-upmanship from a fast food industry which through its actions is really inviting government intervention of the most draconian kind.

Continue reading "Bite me" »

It’s finally happened. I never thought I would encounter a form of junk food which repulsed me. But on a holiday to the US last month I was confronted by a foodstuff so disgusting, so evil both in design and execution, so incredibly, inedibly putrid that my entire value system has been shocked to its core.

Despite generally having a healthy diet, and spending hours flitting about the kitchen knocking up all sorts of effeminate dishes, such as a deeply suss saffron risotto with home-made chicken stock, or pesto with basil gathered from the garden in a poncy basket, I’ve long held a perverse enthusiasm for eating crap.

The crapper the better. Dodgy kebabs, late-night chiko rolls, shallow-fried at home out of the box hidden in the back of the freezer, even those mysterious Hot Pizza Heroes from the local servo, turbo-charged before microwaving with the addition of extra cheese and half a handful of jalapeños.

Continue reading "Breakfast from hell on the highway to heart disease" »

“We wanna see the pig in action!!”

This is but one of the many comments that appeared on the UK Telegraph’s website after it posted a story about Donna Simpson, a 42 year-old mother of two from New Jersey who wants to be the world’s fattest woman.

To do this, she’ll have to double her weight to hit the 1,000lb mark (roughly 454kg), giving her the dubious honour of weighing more than any other woman on the planet: about 6.8 times the weight of the average woman in Australia.

Continue reading "Woman who wants to be world’s fattest reveals more" »

Think you’re a normal weight? So did I, until I got stuck in lift at 2am.

A big group of us piled in and it promptly broke.

After the shock of screaming to a halt between floors, we were indignant. The lift said it could hold 12 people. There were only 11 of us.

Continue reading "Fat tax useless if overweight is the new average" »

If the legislation for the Orwellian­-sounding Australian National Preventive Health Agency passes, then expect an avalanche of make­-work exercises by the Agency all for the cause of making us healthier.

Armed with a budget of $133 million of your money over four years, the agency would get to work advising commonwealth and state health ministers about health issues surrounding alcohol and tobacco consumption and obesity.

It will look to create new policies about interventions in settings such as schools, workplaces and communities.

Continue reading "The perils of a fat tax" »

Hi.  My name is Ashlee.  I’m a 24 year old Australian woman. I have a relatively successful media career for my age, given the current economic climate. I currently live and work in Indonesia. I have always tried to give back to the communities in which I live through volunteering and I don’t have a criminal record. I do have a gym membership though. I’m doing OK. Oh, but I forgot to add, I am fat.

Actually, I should say obese, according to my BMI. 

And apparently this makes me some kind of social pariah who should be the target of intense public ridicule and scorn, no matter what food I may or may not put in my mouth, no matter how many times a week I work out. 

Continue reading "Why is the weight debate full of so much hate?" »

This week parliament will debate a bill to establish a national Preventive Health Agency, reminding of that classic Mark Twain observation: nobody is safe while the legislature is in session.

On The Punch Federal health minister Nicola Roxon insisted that she was no nanny statist, and that the purpose of the Agency was about saving lives and reducing health costs.

Most modern governments understand the follies of outright bans, such as the failed US Prohibition movement from 1919 to 1933. However, the Agency plans what it sees as the next best thing.

Continue reading "Counterpunch: The nanny state will nag you to death" »

Next week Parliament is set to consider legislation that is another first from the Rudd Government – Australia’s first agency dedicated to Preventative Health. 

Currently the media abounds with stories about our obesity epidemic, rising rates of chronic disease and problems with alcohol and tobacco.  This Agency will help us do something about those problems. 

As much as some media outlets find the labels irresistible, this isn’t about creating a nanny state, or nagging people into being ‘good’.  This Agency will be staffed with experts who will work hard to find the best possible ways to help us be healthier – and reduce our health bill as a result.

Continue reading "I’m no nanny, it’s about saving lives and the system" »

Does anyone else find it quite frankly perverse that in affluent first-world Australia so much time is spent fretting about the supposed weight problems of our children when UNICEF figures show five thousand kids across the globe die every day essentially because they can’t get a clean glass of water?

I sure as hell do. But here we go again. Last week the Rudd Government’s Preventative Health Task Force Report called for a ban on junk food advertising on TV before 9:00pm and for the use of toys, cartoon characters and celebrities that appeal to children to be phased out. But the Australian Communications and Media Authority is against the banning of those TV ads.

The reaction? A seething white-hot fury coming from nice middle class homes all over Sydney. How can anyone possibly put corporate profits before our kids’ health?

Continue reading "Junk food doesn’t make kids fat - junk parents do" »

The Elites are back in town – that is those people who tell us endlessly that they know better than the rest of us how we should eat, drink and presumably be merry or melancholy are back with a vengeance.

And they are never satisfied – their self belief is ever growing if you give in a bit they push even further to enhance their power and control.

Not satisfied with demanding new taxes for alcohol to make it so expensive that they can kill the wine industry and dictate what and when we drink, they then move on to tell us what we can or cannot eat and how we should look.

Continue reading "Is beauty now in the eye of the Body Mass Index?" »

Fine dining fans will be thrilled to hear that the world’s most famous restaurant – McDonalds – has just made a bold pitch for the haute cuisine end of the market with the release of two new burgers made with prime export-quality Australian Angus beef.

“Served on a sourdough bun and with gourmet trimmings for $6.45 and $6.75 respectively, the burgers represent a premium option for cost-conscious diners” a Maccas spokesman said this week.

Many people will think this latest marketing ploy is a disgrace. And I agree with them.

Continue reading "Take your kids to Maccas with pride" »

If you took the kids to McDonald’s on the weekend then brace yourself: you may just have landed yourself in hot water with child welfare. While you might claim you were engaging in an entirely innocent and harmless activity that has been going on for decades, you were in fact abusing your kids.

That is if you take the word of UK Daily Mail columnist Amanda Platell who recently labelled parents who feed their overweight kids junk food child abusers. Platell was particularly incensed by the failure of a healthy eating plan sponsored by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, due, in her opinion, to parents who insisted on feeding their kids junk food at home.

Platell’s branding such behaviour child abuse is part of a growing trend in which the definition of child abuse has been radically expanded to include pretty well any behaviour or point of view to which someone, somewhere objects. Platell isn’t the only one who subscribes to this view.

Continue reading "Abusing the term “child abuse” is dangerous" »

So long, farewell, and thanks for all the flab.

Goodbye “Dance Your Ass Off”. Goodbye to the lurid outfits and the ridiculous hats that Australian audiences for but one brief week got to sample. Goodbye to the prospect of a weekly side-serving of self-abasing, mortifying attempts at burlesque routines and swing-dancing in the name of farewelling the extra kilos.

Channel Nine in its estimable wisdom and impeccable taste broadcast the first episode of this part dance competition, part ritualistic humiliation of overweight wannabes for Australian audience’s viewing pleasure a couple of weeks ago.

Continue reading "Finally, modern TV masters the art of humiliating the fat" »

So Fat-shionistas (their word, not mine) have come together for the launch of Full Figured Fashion Week in New York, and larger women all over Manhattan are excitedly gathering in anticipation of clothing that is actually on trend and made in big-girl-friendly sizes.

It seems too good to be true after the recent too-small-clothing debate, with UK Vogue Editor Alexandra Shulman calling for designers to up their sample sizes.

Five years in the making, the event organizer Gwen De Voe is hoping to get the attention of fashion designers globally.

“The main objective is to show the consumers and buyers that there are other designers out there.”

She’s expecting 1500 people to attend including retail buyers and plus sized customers all looking for a solution to their what to wear dilemmas.

Continue reading "Fatshionistas are hip, but can they fit into the dress?" »

Enforcing a blanket ban on advertising certain foods to children is not the answer to solving Australia’s obesity problem.

Activists and some politicians bleating for a ban on advertising high fat, sugar or salt (HFSS) foods on all media before 9pm need to get real.

Arguing that television adverts for HFSS foods are almost totally responsible for making people overweight, especially children, is an extraordinary leap of logic.

Continue reading "Changing ads on TV won’t tackle the obesity epidemic" »

The outsourcing of responsibility for your own stupid behaviour to our nanny government continues apace with Kevin Rudd’s cockamamie plan to effectively pay people to stop shovelling tons of junk down their throats while sitting on their bum watching the telly.

Central to this plan is the utterly laughable claim from the 2007-2008 National Health Survey that 68 per cent of Australians are obese or overweight.

This figure says nothing about the real health of many thousands of Australians, but plenty about the ludicrously narrow definition of obesity.

Continue reading "Hey Kev, get your hands off my modestly-sized beer gut" »

A new preventative health agency is set to be established in the coming months that will tell people what they can eat, drink and certainly not smoke.

It will also attempt to monitor how much of this bad behaviour we are indulging in by working out how fat we’re getting. It’s also likely going to aim to get us fit and exercising as “communities”. 

So be prepared to be awoken by a megaphone wielding Nicola Roxon who will no doubt lecture you on why you shouldn’t be hung-over as she accompanies you to the local common for some invigorating star jumps.

The fat patrol are no longer vigilantes, they’ve been given their own agency.

Continue reading "Open up, it’s the fat police" »

Low-carb beers are a beer of the moment. They are the “IT girl” of the beer world with their sales growing at a remarkable 900 per cent per year and every man and his dog who owns a brewery clamouring to get one on the market.

Despite this, you won’t find too many brewers bragging about the beers in any sense other than the technical achievement in producing them. Beer marketers and brewery bean counters will sing their praises endlessly, but the actual brewers seem to stay silent on them – a little like Hunter S. Thompson might have done if he had had a sideline writing Mills and Boon novels.

When they do mention them it is usually in the pragmatic terms of giving the market what they want. The key to the beer’s success – apart from their light flavour profile – is in their name: low carb.

Continue reading "Fruit versus lager: exploding the myth of the beer belly" »

A Parliamentary committee looking at obesity has recommended, among other things, Government-funded stomach stapling operations and a national fat register.

In all there’s 19 recommendations, including the obligatory education campaigns, further discussion of tax incentives, and better regulation of the weight loss industry. But much of it is small arms in the face of this marching army.

Take a 360 degree spin around this intersection in on the southern outskirts of Sydney to see what health authorities are really up against.

View Larger Map

Continue reading "The epicentres of Australia’s obesity epidemic" »