If we had an elected post of President of the World, Jamie Oliver wouldn’t be the worst candidate. In fact he would be quite high on my short list, if for no other reason than his tireless campaigning for decent food. This campaigning is now taking him directly to the UN, where there is to be a major medical debate on non-communicable diseases, with the world-wide obesity epidemic high on the agenda. Oliver has called for a global movement to make obesity a human rights issue, and he is attempting to generate a global debate on the subject.

In a hard hitting, no nonsense language that he has become famous for, Jamie tells us:

With our western-style diets, our biggest problems are a direct result of what experts call ‘bad feeding’ which basically means eating a load of rubbish, highly processed food that’s jammed full of salt, fats, sugars, additives and cheap processed meats.

Jamie has many highly respected experts on his side, not least the former government chief scientist Sir David King who will be teaming up with Oliver at the forthcoming UN conference. King makes the sobering point that this obesity thing is not just limited to the over-indulged western nations but is a world-wide phenomenon affecting the developing world as much as the developed. King explains;

There seems to be a trend with developing countries wanting to follow in the footsteps of the western world, and copy their patterns of fast food and consumerism. Pre-packed convenience food is seen as a symbol of being modern in developing countries but the problems it causes are long term and costly.

Then directing his attention to Britain King adds:

By 2050, 60% of men and 50% of women could be clinically obese. Our biology has stepped out of kilter with society. Most adults in the UK are already overweight and modern living ensures every generation is heavier than the last.

Unlike global warming for example, there is little dispute or controversy as to the dimensions (cheap pun) of the problem. Where there definitely is controversy is how to tackle the problem. There are two main schools of thought; the first being to ‘nudge’ people into changing their eating and exercise routines, the other to legislate against the food and drinks industry which are clearly culpable for manufacturing and promoting the oceans of junk food that surrounds us all. It would be no surprise to regular readers that Sporting Polemics swings firmly behind the legislate and regulate school of thinking.

Once again, Felicity Lawrence, writing in The Guardian 8/9/11 superbly puts the case for legislation and regulation against the corporate monolith. Lambasting the Tory government’s preference for the ‘nudge theory’, which basically boils down to the do nothing policy, Lawrence has this to say:

The coalition government has chosen to cast public health as a matter of personal responsibility. It takes the classical liberal view that individuals should make their own choices, free from state intrusion. Nudging us to a healthier choice is OK, but regulating is not.

Then Lawrence accurately draws the class component of the obesity epidemic and in so doing lampoons the government’s skewed logic. Lawrence continues aiming her venom directly at the real culprits the food and drinks conglomerates:

On this liberal reading, the fact that your risk of being obese relates closely to your socio-economic status is not a question of social justice but a problem of the feckless poor being too ignorant or spineless to make good choices. This is a dangerous misrepresentation. It conflates the right of the individual to freedom from interference with the right of business to the same freedom from government constraint. It ignores the fact that business intrudes on our choices constantly with its powerful marketing and sales strategies. It refuses to acknowledge that industry’s interests to maximise consumption and profits are in direct conflict with public health needs. We need them to sell less of their junk foods and alcoholic drinks. They need us to keep buying them.

There, in a succinct nutshell, is the basic and never-ending contradiction between the needs of the global community and the insatiable and rapacious greed of capitalism. You cannot nudge your way out of that contradiction, and to be honest, I’m not even sure you can regulate your way out of it. For as long as capitalism rules the roost, we are stuck with the incompatibility between the two. The tobacco industry, the oil industry, the arms industry and the pharmaceuticals, along with the food and drinks industry, are simply in it for the big bucks and no amount of softly softly nudging is going to deflect them from their core purpose. Ditto for the banks and other global financial institutions.

Nevertheless, we have to start somewhere and getting lead the out of petrol and cfc’s out of refrigerators shows that the corporate beast can be reigned in if public health, including their own, is seriously deemed to be at risk. Even big tobacco has been forced to take a few minor steps backwards in the developed world, though it should be noted that no such restrictions have been placed on their global operations in the developing nations. All three of these public health advances have come via legislation and not through gentle persuasion. If we want a good example of how ineffective the government’s nudge theory is just look at the scandalous case of the plastic bags. Every sane person on the planet knows these long-term, highly polluting bags should be taken out of circulation immediately, but still successive governments have dithered with empty platitudes and pleadings. The net result being, that more of these cursed toxic items are being circulated around the planet than ever before. So much for nudging people to change their behaviour. Legislate against the damn things and be done with it. Even the Daily Mail agrees on this one!

As for the alarming levels of salt, fats and sugar in our processed foods, simply set a safe global limit and fine the companies mercilessly if they don’t comply. Once we have successfully legislated, and done so across the globe, then governments can play around with educating people to adopt more healthy lifestyles. Yes, we do have a personal responsibility to keep ourselves fit and healthy but that responsibility is near on impossible to carry out while we are surrounded by corporate drug pushers and compliant governments. Never forget, the most prevalent, harmful and addictive drug on the planet is sugar and we humans are being poisoned by it at an alarming rate. Jamie Oliver will need to be at his campaigning best if he is to mobilise a movement against these corporate drug pushers. Where do we sign up?

Postscript: In a sobering indictment of the free market system the Red Cross had this to say:

If the free interplay of market forces has produced an outcome where 15 percent of humanity are hungry while 20 percent are overweight, something has gone wrong somewhere.

Not content simply to indict the free market system, the Red Cross accurately describes the essence of the problem:

Hunger existed not because there was a lack of food globally but because of poor distribution, wastage and rising prices that made food unaffordable. Food prices have spiked globally this year because of speculative commodity trading and climate change. We have always known that hunger is a man-made tragedy, not a result of natural scarcity. Metro Tariq Tahir 23/9/11

The ‘something that has gone wrong’ is of course a capitalist system of production that always and everywhere ultimately puts private profit first. That is the nature of the beast.