How much can we stomach?

The Fat Doctor is lined up to fuel the fasination for the morbidly obese. Photo / Supplied by Prime TV

The camera zooms in on an indeterminable body part - a vast, voluminous, fold of flesh. It could be a thigh, an elbow or a breast. There's just no telling.

As it zooms out, it reveals a bigger - a much bigger - picture. A morbidly obese person, too fat to sit up, beached in front of the telly. If your natural instinct is one of repulsion, prompting a stab at the remote, it's likely the next channel will be showing a do-or-diet show like The Biggest Loser.

But the appetite for supersized "docos" may finally be sated, say network programmers, who have been luring viewers with titles like Half Ton Mum and The Boy Who Couldn't Lose Weight.

A flick through recent TV listings reveals an epidemic of fat television - from reality fat camps and diet doctors, to voyeuristic documentaries showcasing the most extreme cases of obesity.

This season, all the major free-to-air channels have gone to fat in prime time with programmes imported, for the most part, from the United States and Britain.

On TV One this month, we had Real Life: Eating Themselves to Death, while TV3 served up the world's fattest mother last month in Half Ton Mum.

Soon Prime will give us a fatty-a-week on the upcoming British series Fat Doctor.

Some argue the trend simply reflects what's going on in our society: obesity is a growing health and social issue that should be discussed in the media. TVNZ manager of programming Jane Wilson toes this line, saying: "Any documentary that highlights social issues heightens public awareness."

But that is not the case, according to diabetes specialist Dr Brandon Orr-Walker, who sees the trend as a double-edged sword. He says programmes that deal in the extreme are not helpful.

"People who are extremely overweight, know they are extremely overweight. Our local research suggests people in moderate overweight categories don't appreciate that. It's sort of like, 'oh, obesity is just those huge people. We're not quite as bad as that'."

But, while some of the programmes are exploitative and unhelpful, he says the increased awareness of the issue has encouraged the industry to produce some valuable, real-world stories.

One such story is that of Haumoana Kopua, who will feature in next Thursday's Inside New Zealand: The 200kg Kid. One of the first teenagers in New Zealand ever to undergo bariatric surgery, Kopua's story unfolds over a two-year period and follows the 15-year-old before and after the life-altering operation.