Like many fortysomething Irish men, I try to live a reasonably healthy life in between the pints, the Twixes and a car dashboard littered with sandwich wrappers, milky takeaway coffee cups and more than the odd crumpled up, badly-hidden bag of Tayto. Let’s just say that if the car were preserved as a crime scene, you wouldn’t need the microscopic tricks of those fancy lads from CSI to get a conviction.
As a result, twice a week I haul myself around football pitches playing something that vaguely resembles a game we once played as teenagers.
Today, I don’t drink as many pints as I used to, but I should drink less wine, a lot less! I generally don’t gorge excessively. Owning a labrador (who is also fighting the middle-aged spread) helps to get me out of the house and up the hill most mornings. Unlike some of my friends, I haven’t succumbed to the racing bike, but there’s always time.
I have always liked playing sport, but have no personal discipline, so gyms aren’t an option. I need other lads roaring at me to keep up, so team sports like football are essential. There is also a great release where I can lose the rag and explode on the pitch in a way I can’t do anywhere else. I have tried to point out to the lads that midweek pints after the match aren’t the smartest, but you have to be sociable, don’t you?
However, the main concern – and it’s more a “lurking in the back of the mind” concern, than a daily anxiety – is to stay healthy as I get older and not put on too much weight.
The weight thing is part male vanity prompted by the arrival of the dreaded Ned Kelly, but it is also an awareness that fat kills and fat kills early and unpleasantly. It is hard to overstate just how destructive being overweight can be and how hard it is to lose weight once you put it on. Ireland is getting fat at a rate few of us can appreciate, yet which we can see all around us.
Over 30 per cent of Irish men and women are now either overweight or obese. Rates of obesity throughout the population are rising at about 1 per cent per annum. So, every year, an extra 1 per cent of the population becomes overweight or obese. This is truly shocking because we are talking here about between 40,000 and 50,000 people per year in Ireland alone. Consider if these rates continue as they have been since 2005, 80 per cent of the Irish population between the ages of 21 and 60 could be obese or overweight by 2040.
This is new. Imagine you were to measure Irish people’s existence since the first hunter-gatherers came here in terms of a 24-hour clock. Up to 11.55pm the problem for Irish people wouldn’t have been too much food, but too little! We forget that significant hunger was part of human existence up until recently, and we with our famine history should appreciate this.
Now this has changed. Worldwide today, there are nearly two and a half times more people overweight or obese than there are people undernourished. This is a huge dilemma. We have gone from not enough food to too much food in 40 years, and obesity has rocketed.
This week a new study by McKinsey lays out the figures – and they are shocking. More than 2.1 billion people – nearly 30 per cent of the global population – are overweight or obese. Obesity, which should be preventable, is now responsible for about 5 per cent of all deaths worldwide from a variety of diseases ranging from diabetes to heart disease and respiratory illnesses. According to McKinsey, the global economic impact of obesity is roughly $2 trillion. This is 2.8 per cent of global GDP. This figure is equivalent to the GDP of Italy or Russia. Obesity today has the same negative impact on the global economy as armed conflict, and only a shade less than smoking.
Around the world, 2 to 7 per cent of all direct healthcare spending relates to measures to prevent and treat this condition. Up to 20 per cent of all healthcare spending is attributable to obesity, through related diseases such as type-2 diabetes and heart disease. These healthcare costs place a massive burden on government finances. Furthermore, overall economic productivity and employers are both affected by impaired productivity because overweight and obese employees get sick more often.
Things are getting worse, quickly. Extrapolating from the figures in the report, by 2050, a quarter of children in Ireland could be obese. And these will be poor children, not rich children. Kids in the most deprived areas are twice as likely to be obese as kids from rich areas. One of the biggest leading indicators of obesity in children is if they have obese or overweight parents.
There are many reasons that can explain why we are getting fat. For example, we evolved as a species worried about starvation so the body is able to store energy as fat when there is too little food around. When there is too much, we don’t have the reverse mechanism.
Food is much cheaper than it used to be. Modern life means we sit around more and children do less exercise. For example, in 1969 about 40 per cent of US schoolchildren walked or rode their bikes to school; by 2001, only 13 per cent did.
We are urbanising, too. As we get richer, we eat out more and change the way we eat. Did you know that you eat twice as much if you eat with a group of seven than if you eat alone?
Obesity is a global epidemic and, in Ireland, we are already well on our way to a fat future with all its attendant problems and cost, both material and emotional.
The state needs to take this problem seriously and realise that, to slow down the obesity rates, it needs to embark on a massive education programme to warn people about how they are ruining their own lives by eating the wrong stuff and not exercising enough. The change in behaviour doesn’t have to be dramatic. Eating a little bit less and exercising a little bit more would be a good place to start.
Otherwise, the logical political conclusion ise that the fit and healthy will ask why their taxes are being used to cure the health problems of the lazy and obese, particularly when those health problems look to be entirely self-inflicted.
David I love it when you get it wrong, Im usually like Solieri looking at Mozarts unedited first drafts of symphony. You are usually 100% but you have this totally wrong. Why would you ask this or any Government to “educate” the masses. Which overweight fat bloated horse breathed fuck up would you put in charge? Reilly? Varadker? Oh how about Noonan? Mary Lou? Hmmmmm? These disgusting pigs should not be educating you or anyone else on anything, particularly trans fats or the glycemic index and the dangers of a low fiber high saturated fat diet. Any click of the… Read more »
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Initially I thought from the caption of the article it was about the Rugby success on Saturday , then as I read it I thought should it get a PG cert for hard core cookery and car clean principles .Eventually I agreed the article is about felony whereby the national interest of the country indulges in gluttony .
Brogan has the answer. Put a few drills of spuds in your garden. You get fitter happier and have supplied yourself with your own food. What the article hasn’t said is that a lot of “food” is stripped of its nutrition in the processing phase and lots of sugar added. Why put sugar in? Highly addictive stuff which keeps you buying the shite containing all the sugar. Also fucks up the seretonin chemical in the body. Seretonin is the feel good chemical. When there is too much sugar in your system your insulin converts the sugar to fat. You feel… Read more »
I think the article opens up a much broader question about the type of society we live in and want to live in. How much personal responsibility people should take for obesity, for example and how much responsibility the government should take for the problem. What is the correct mix? I do believe the majority of people in Ireland have become far too dependent on the Government for hand-outs/cushy jobs/benefits but are also very quick to blame ‘the Government’ for just about anything as though it was some external foreign entity controlling them. But,I do agree, it does require education… Read more »
I think the article opens up a much broader question about the type of society we live in and want to live in. How much personal responsibility people should take for obesity, for example and how much responsibility the government should take for the problem. What is the correct mix? I do believe the majority of people in Ireland have become far too dependent on the Government for hand-outs/cushy jobs/benefits but are also very quick to blame ‘the Government’ for just about anything as though it was some external foreign entity controlling them. But,I do agree, it does require education… Read more »
St Thomas Aquinas
He defines gluttony as : eating of food that is ‘too luxurious , exotic , or costly or excessive in quantity or gorging on grub that is too daintily or elaborately prepared , eating too soon or at an inappropriate time and eating too eagerly’ .This is banned by the Catholic Church .
I’ll try and get in before all the conspiracy theorists come up with dangers of sugar, salt, fat, protein carbohydrates, and whatever else your havin’. Its very simple- don’t eat too much, and make sure you eat mostly plant based foods. Exercise, while good for you, cannot be a main element of weight loss. The only way to lose weight is to eat less.
If your worried that this is a bit of shameless advertising for my business, your correct. Thanks David :-)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-katz-md/diet-and-nutrition_b_5427555.html
I’m not sure any education is required, we already know the answers. Many people still smoke even though they’ll admit that it will shorten their lives and may lead to horrible illnesses such as emphysema and lung cancer. People don’t see that the food is bad and it’s not like everyone who is obese is living on a diet of pizzas and chips. The scales are tipped by stress in personal and professional lives, the availability of cheap foods of high calorific value and longer sedentary working hours. The diet of the average Irish farmer before the potato famine would… Read more »
Can’t say I’ve noticed all these fat people walking around. Excuse me, I believe the word is ‘obese’ is it? Surely that is just the posh word for fat. (In the same way, I might go to the hospital but my neighbour ‘presents’.) Now, I have read about all these obeseniks and people, who have also read about them or watched documentaries about them, have also told me about them, yet that is not quite the same thing as *seeing* them. If there were that many of them they’d block the light from getting through. Like the Apostle Thomas, seeing… Read more »
I have to agree with David’s article, irish obesity levels are shocking and unlike smokey I think the state has to step in and take charge. As a teacher for the last fourteen years I have taught a succession of first years who have gotten bigger and bigger. I think there are many reasons for this, yes as david points out food is more readily available and in bigger quantities but it also the types of foods that we eat. I remember doing an eating survey with second years around about ten years ago to find out about the types… Read more »
Look, It’s very simple! The reason why kids and adults are becoming obese is down to modern day parenting. A lot of parents today just couldn’t be bothered cooking nutritious meals. It’s all down to convenience foods that most of our kids are putting on weight. Tins of this and packets of that all contributes to this problem. There’s also the fact that a lot of what you could call nutritious foodstuffs are out of the price range for a lot of Irish families. The price of meat and fish has become astronomical for many, so, they’re caught in the… Read more »
“Let’s just say that if the car were preserved as a crime scene, you wouldn’t need the microscopic tricks of those fancy lads from CSI to get a conviction”
I’m still chuckin’ at that one !lol
Yes I have often thought that the skinny 100 pound lady with a suitcase should pay less than the overweight 300 lb business man with no luggage.
Not to mention sitting next to the “large” who spill over into my seat on the plane!! They should pay for volume occupied!!
Speaking of education and knowledge,this mural in Darakshan refugee camp, Irbil, northern Iraq, says “Knowledge is light.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-30105501
This short article implies that, here in S. Korea, boys these days tend to suffer more from obesity than girls. http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20141012000167 They also spend much more time than girls playing computer games. And there is still a tendency for mothers to spoil their sons more than their daughters. This often means excess pocket money for evening “snacks”, as the kids trawl from one private academy to another. Mum may cook a meal at the weekends, but she’s pretty tired as she’s been working all week just like Dad. There is obesity among girls too, but this is countered by the… Read more »
TELLY-BELLY !!!
Of course there is an obesity problem. Middle aged suburban males sitting on the couch watching television, being fed a daily diet of comical distraction, and high adrenalin irrelevancy.
Roisin Shortall, when she was a minister, declared that Ireland had an alcohol consumption problem, and that Ireland’s health system was carrying the results.
Shortall suggested that Ireland needed to decrease it’s total alcohol consumption, for health reasons.
The Guinness gut was for the cut.
But instead Shortall got the cut. Officially it was about primary care centres.
But the manner in which the “Labour” Party (how come none of them ever tried any) discarded Shortall, suggests that the party leadership had already made their minds up that Shortall was causing them “discomfort”.
Roisin Shortall, when she was a minister, declared that Ireland had an alcohol consumption problem, and that Ireland’s health system was carrying the results.
Shortall suggested that Ireland needed to decrease it’s total alcohol consumption, for health reasons.
The Guinness gut was for the cut.
But instead Shortall got the cut. Officially it was about primary care centres.
But the manner in which the “Labour” Party (how come none of them ever tried any) discarded Shortall, suggests that the party leadership had already made their minds up that Shortall was causing them “discomfort”.
I just conducted an experment at work. Kathleen, is there an epidemic of obesity in Ireland? K1 They say so but I haven’t seen it. K2 They are talking about it but I haven’t seen it. Me: I haven’t seen it either. I did not lean on them to give the right answer (not that there is such as thing as a ‘right’ answer). You can prepare a delicious nutritious home-cooked meal for the whole family in just a few short minutes using fresh natural ingredients at just a fraction of the cost of a take-away! I got that off… Read more »
Central banks are way over weight and pompous to boot.
““The initiative is dangerous because it would weaken the SNB,” he told an audience near Zurich last week. “The connection between a minimum share and a ban on selling which it embraces would very severely impair our monetary policy room for manoeuvre.”
That is exactly what honest money does. Keeps bankers honest. It restricts them from spoiling the economy through unbridled printing or inflation of the currency. like all fat bloated institutions it will die a premature death. Likr the bloated government we can not afford it any more.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/25/fears-switzerland-referendum-spark-gold-rush
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-11-25/here-comes-france-right-wing-leader-marine-le-pen-demands-central-bank-repatriate-fr
Requests/demands becoming a torrent
currencies in waterfall On the U.S. dollar, Mannarino says, “The U.S. dollar is in a terminal phase. I don’t care what dollar’s strength is recently with regard to other currencies out there. We have countries, specifically China and specifically Russia, who are betting against the U.S. dollar. How do I know they are doing this? They are acquiring huge amounts of gold with these suppressed prices. This is what everybody needs to do as well. Bet against the debt and become your own central bank. . . . The U.S. dollar is a dying currency. It is in the terminal… Read more »
Why the one per cent will eat well and the rest of us will be reduced to the poor under nourishment of the cheapest food available?
Why the rich will grow fat and sassy and the rest obese and sickly.
It all reduces to central bank policies. The central banks will be the death of us. We need to concentrate on the basic problem and not be diverted into and distracted by other relatively minor issues.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/11/24/swiss-gold-referendum-really-means-paul-craig-roberts/
We should cash-bomb the people – not the banks
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/26/eu-cash-bomb-recession-juncker-new-fund
Announcement (hopefully some will respond)
We will be in Ireland Dec 28th-Jan 12th with no set agenda but with wheels. Hopefully we will meet a few posters and share a laugh or too as we solve the worlds problems.
If you wish contact me at tony@tonybrogan.com and I will drive to wherever you are. Could be a fun trip!!
(Thanks, David for allowing this post :)
EU Cracking around the seams. Too many regs coming from the center. Holes in the water pipes?
http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/35860/EU-Desperation-Using-Germany-as-a-Club-to-Threaten-the-West/