....for tomorrow we die
?Christmas is coming and it's not just the geese that are getting fat. As the majority of the developed world prepares for the traditional season of over-indulgence in food and alcohol, there has been a flurry of headlines about the consequences of excessive consumption.
Christmas is coming and it's not just the geese that are getting fat. As the majority of the developed world prepares for the traditional season of over-indulgence in food and alcohol, there has been a flurry of headlines about the consequences of excessive consumption.
These include a threat of fares on an Australian airline being based on the passenger's size; reports that doctors in the UK are seeing rising numbers of patients, many of them women, in their late teens and early twenties with severe alcohol-related disease; a call by IVF experts to refuse fertility treatment to obese women until they lose weight; and a warning to diabetics that wearing the wrong shoes could lead to the amputation of their lower limbs.
In today's blame-orientated culture, the search is on for a culprit. Is it the food manufacturers" fault for creating so many tempting products laden with salt, fat and sugar? What about the advertising industry for visually force-feeding them to children through the TV screen? Or should governments have stepped in earlier and more decisively to save us from our own bad eating habits?
Certainly consumer education is no longer the answer. We all know what we should be doing, and we know the potential consequences if we don't - but that doesn't seem to be enough to make us change our behaviour.
Perhaps the answer is to put a legal limit on portion sizes, restrict the number of fast-food outlets or bars within a square kilometre or put salty, sugary and fatty food back on ration.
Or perhaps we should be a little less sensitive to people's feelings and make obesity as socially unacceptable as smoking by banning all advertising, plastering dire warnings on the packaging and declaring certain areas junk food-free zones.
From the pharmaceutical industry's point of view, it is supremely ironic that companies are restricted in what they are allowed to communicate to consumers about their medical conditions and the products available to treat them, while the products that contribute to those conditions can be advertised without stricture.
On that note, on behalf of all those at Manufacturing Chemist, may I wish you a happy and above all healthy festive season. And those of you manufacturing antiobesity drugs and therapies to treat the resulting disorders can look forward to a very prosperous New Year!