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Home / New Zealand

<i>John Roughan:</i> Obesity a scourge? Pass the salt

John Roughan
By John Roughan
Opinion Writer·
5 Sep, 2003 05:19 AM5 mins to read

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COMMENT

The bloke who stares back at me barechested in the bathroom mirror these days is a pleasant surprise. Those are a decent pair of pectorals.

I don't suppose they are muscle; the heaviest thing he lifts all week is today's paper. More likely they are a deposit of the same stuff
that causes that sag in the middle. Don't look down.

In fact, if he swivels slightly, straightens the shoulders, sucks in the sag and uses the hands on his hips to compress the spare tyre ... well, you're not looking at the weed on the beach here, babe.

Not any more. It is a pleasant surprise when you remember you were well into your 30s before you ceased to look like a colt. Up on a shelf among the OE slides there's one of me at Antibes circa 1980.

I still recognise the stick figure playing with his firstborn child on the beach. My kids don't. Funny how your own body image is formed early and tends to survive any number of later photographs that show how bulky you've become.

But I have no wish to go back to the shape and weight I was then, spindly and sparrow-breasted, looking about as healthy as a harrier. I mention all this because the medical profession disagrees. The ideal, so I was told by a specialist not long ago, is the weight we were in our late 20s.

I listened to this piece of medical lore with the due respect we always pay to those who have learned it. But inside I was looking at the scarecrow on the beach at Antibes. Would he be saying that if he could see it, too? Quite possibly. The eye seems an unreliable instrument in modern medicine.

Take this business of so-called child obesity. For the life of me I can't see that many fat children about. Can you?

Yet to say so is to invite derision from a public health campaign waged with all the authority of medical wisdom combined with the zeal of social reform.

We read again this week, "One in seven pre-teen children in New Zealand is obese [grossly overweight]". Really? I'd think I would notice.

When I query this, it's suggested I'm in the wrong part of town. "One in four Polynesian children is obese," we read. Maybe the rise in the Polynesian population explains the general figure.

If so, the campaigners have made a deliberate decision to mislead the majority in order to try to reach a group without, as they would say, stigmatising it.

Perhaps they justify the deception on the grounds that it would do nobody any harm to lose weight. But among people I meet, teenage undereating is far greater worry than obesity.

These people, and particularly their daughters, might find it healthy to take this obesity business with a large grain of salt.

It helps to know that obesity, as the profession now defines it, is measured by a calculation of height to weight called the body mass index. Doctors routinely use it when they give you a check-up. It said my weight should be - you guessed it - where it was in my late 20s. Spare me.

The calculation of the ideal body mass index for a child has an allowance for growth and categorises a child as underweight, at risk or overweight if he or she falls into a certain percentage of their age group. It looks like another of those social data that are essentially meaningless because they take no account of an individual's actual health. One size fits all.

Obesity is said to explain the appearance of type 2 diabetes in children, and to be an early indicator of risk of adult diseases such as high blood pressure, hip failure and strokes. One of many no doubt.

You wonder if the campaign has more to do with the thrill some people derive from challenging popular preferences and, even more, from threatening the profits of big global brands.

Odd that we never had this warning all those years our grandparents cooked everything in fat and the only commercial fast-food was fish and chips. Now that the likes of McDonald's and KFC are peddling fat, it is an issue.

Let me offer a little more salt from personal experience. You will have noticed, particularly if you are a man, that when you go the doctor these days no corner of your life and habits is beyond his interest.

They call it holistic medicine, I think, and it's a good thing on the whole.

But it means that when a man goes to a doctor he is quite likely to come out sicker than he thought he was when he went in. He will be seized like the rarely seen specimen he is, measured, prodded, poked and sent for every fluid test available.

About two years ago I went in with a sore back and emerged, on the basis of a blood sample, with a suspected liver dysfunction. Somehow I knew there was nothing wrong. The body can tell you these things.

But I went with the plan. Hence, eventually, the weighty discussion with the specialist.

The thing is, I was supposed to feel ill and didn't. Not in the slightest. Over the course of nearly a year I was sent for more blood tests than taxpayers should have to pay for. I dropped about five of the 18 kilos I had to shed to fit the body mass index but nothing I did made a lasting impact on the counts.

"Are you sure you feel all right?" the specialist would ask each time. "Absolutely fine," I'd assure him.

Eventually we got a couple of good counts in a row and he was happier even than me, I think, to be done with this inexplicable case.

For me it was a reminder that medicine is a splendid thing, because its reach exceeds its grasp. I value its advice but trust my eyes and instincts more. Don't forget the salt.

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