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Obesity
From our first tiny cry—asking for food—to our "seventh age
of slippered ease", what we eat completely shapes our general
health. It was put very succinctly by a previous resident of the
Borough in the following rhyme—
"It's a very odd thing,
As odd as can be;
That whatever Miss T. eats,
Turns into Miss T."
—Walter de la Mare.
It is not without significance that gluttony is listed as one of the
seven deadly sins for, today, we are bedevilled with freak nutritional
patterns and diets which encourage the development of
obesity. Moreover, as a result of the removal of much of the
fibre from our foods each year, some £20 millions are spent on
laxatives and 40,000 gallons of liquid paraffin are drunk to prevent
costiveness.
Although perhaps by definition overweight is not a disease,
nevertheless, its danger as a "trigger" mechanism to many serious
medical conditions continues to be under-rated. Recognition of
the fact that obesity underlies much of the country's ill-health
is becoming universal, albeit too slowly. Today, even the man in
the street is aware that all is not well with society's overweights
and it would seem that only in the last decade or two have the
dangers of obesity to community health been fully recognised and
given due publicity.
Obesity does not just arrive overnight. It has a history of