Can anti-smoking tactics solve obesity crisis?
New guidelines from the National Obesity Forum suggest using "harder hitting" anti-obesity campaigns, akin to anti-tobacco campaigns, in the UK.
The National Obesity Forum is a tiny single-issue pressure group. It has no authority to produce "guidelines" or anything else. It is a pharma-funded lobby group that has managed to provoke the bovine British media into proclaiming that the obesity 'epidemic' is worse than expected.
As the excellent BBC Radio 4 programme More or Less pointed out yesterday, this is a lie. An egregious lie. A complete lie. A deliberate and premeditated lie. (It didn't use those words exactly.)
Asked by More or Less for evidence of a worsening obesity, Tam Fry, chief spokesman for the National Obesity Forum, said:
"We have no actual statistics and figures"
So why claim that 'obesity is worse than expected'?
"A little exaggeration forces the message home"
That's all it takes to make front page news in Britain in 2014—"a little exaggeration".
If there was any integrity left in the UK media, these charlatans would never be allowed on the air again. And yet their lies suit the BBC's longstanding agenda of making eating the new smoking and so it warrants a special article in the specious 'magazine' section. Even a pasting by More or Less—one of the few BBC shows that justifies the license fee—is not enough to halt the bandwagon.
The in-your-face smoking campaigns of the past, [president emeritus of the Hastings Institute, Dan Gilmore] says, effectively convinced people both that their actions bothered others and posed grave danger to themselves.
When it comes to obesity, he says, "the public has not as thoroughly been terrorised [sic]."
What a charming message. If only we could terrorise more people, what a wonderful world it would be.
Any smokers reading this will know exactly what fatties can expect in the years to come by way of stigmatisation and 'denormalisation' (or, if you prefer, terrorism). There's no point lingering on the blatant evidence of the slippery-slope in this article and its headline. If you can't see by now that the same hateful tactics used against smokers are being deployed against consumers of salt, sugar, fat and alcohol then I'm afraid that you are an idiot.
Whether idiot or not, please make sure you listen to the More or Less item in full. It is a voice of reason in a desert of hysteria. It's a shame that the BBC doesn't ask the More or Less team to fact-check every news story *before* they report it. Sadly, I doubt the BBC News crew care about the truth.
