Well, now we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are alarmingly fat, grossly so. That despite all the good news lately about our being up to standard to adopt the euro, our real figures, our bodies, are truly our unmissable gross domestic product.
The whole world is getting fatter, at least the developed world is, but why are we leading in these alarming obesity stakes and, more importantly, do we need another “kumitat” to really start doing something about it? I am pretty sure all the people in the Health Department here have enough know-how to set some targets, some doables right away. Was this just an excuse for another interminably boring press conference? Wouldn’t the minister concerned have been better off giving a press conference when he had a strategy rather than just describe the problem, which we know has been alarmingly bad for quite a few years.
To describe the problem is easy. I will do it in one paragraph. People do not want press conferences and PBS news time wasted on ministers describing problems anymore. They want ministers to take a leaf out of the Prime Minister’s book and address the press when they have something meaningful to say, or at least a plan to do something.
The problem then is this.
Sixty-eight per cent of Maltese adults and 35 per cent of Maltese and Gozitan children are overweight. If you want more gender specific details, 41.6 per cent of Maltese men are overweight compared to 29 per cent of women in the 20 to 64 age bracket at least.
Surprising perhaps that the men who go out to work are fatter than the Maltese women who in many cases stay home and are naturally prone to nibble more, but then perhaps it is the Maltese women, the cooks of Malta, in the main who are overfeeding their men and their children, the motives for this, along with our conspicuous purchasing of all manner of junk food masquerading as real food probably merits another article.
On even more specifics, our consumption of fruit and vegetables is going down even among children with a dip of a further four per cent in the last four years, a dip which Marianne Massa the main investigator of the study described as alarming and she said, “We would have at least expected children’s consumption of fruit and vegetables to go up or remain stable, not go down.”
So this whole gross domestic product of ours merits two main questions. Why are we so fat and what can be done about it?
We are fat because we are obsessed with food; our whole culture, social life revolves around food.
Sadly though it doesn’t revolve around excellent food, like the culture of the Italians and the French who are leaner than us. It doesn’t revolve around the kind of love for food that magazines like Taste try to extol.
We are not foodies, we are fatties. We are unhappy and bored. We need something in our mouths and food is the easiest and cheapest thing to come by. We are not busy enough so we eat. We talk about each other too much and eat a lot while we do it. This is a nation in perpetual gossip mode, alarmingly so when you consider how few women work outside the home and how much time they have to talk, to eat and to talk again, as do many of the men at work too incidentally. Sadly though, besides trying to gratify our own unhappiness with food we also seek to console our children in the same way. Packets are given out like we were handed an apple when we were young and hungry and tearing around the place, not stuck in front of a telly or chatting ad nauseam courtesy of MSN and Skype. In school lunch boxes sweets are de rigeur and not the occasional treat.
Our children too are overstressed and overworked. Food helps to keep stress at bay, at least in the short term. We all know how good we feel after we munch our way through a packet of ready salted Walkers crisps or gorge on a tub of Pringles. We all know, even those of us who are not fatties how instantly happy a Bacio or a Yorkie can make you feel. Some of us though can’t stop, won’t stop.
For all those adults who have spent a lifetime overeating and dieting there is very little hope. They have to watch what they eat all their lives because dieting makes you fat, makes your body hold on to every morsel of food you give it, knowing full well it may be starved of nourishment for hours and hours. We spend a fortune on diets and slimming treatments and we get fatter. We should target our children first in this anti obesity campaign and tackle this problem seriously.
What to do quickly? Ban junk food and sweets from all schools much as we ban mobiles, cigarettes and alcohol. Start taxing junk food as we tax cigarettes so a packet of crisps costs one pound, a fizzy soft drink the same. Get us back to drinking water again. Use the revenue from this for fruit and veg vouchers that government can hand out to start encouraging us to buy fresh fruit and veg here. We are at least blessed with wonderful produce. Our tomatoes, our potatoes, our figs are the best anywhere and we are not eating enough of them
Junk food adverts should be banned from all media and should have a health warning on it. Even those packets of fruit juice we happily give our children should not exceed one a day; I remember seeing this information on packets abroad that no more than one a day should be consumed. Use the media to drum the message about fat being unacceptable. Make a sports certificate compulsory at school and make sure our children spend an hour a day at school really doing sports!
Give tax rebates as well as charge no VAT on any exercise or dance or anything that gets this country’s men women and children moving. Be a proactive and energetic government. Get our ministers and our Church leaders, and indeed all leaders or prominent people who grace our media to lead by example and fight the battle of the bulge.
Our fat is a national disgrace. We are starting to look as ugly as this country is looking with its perpetual building site appearance. We are the fat locals looking on while skinny black Africans do the hard labour. It is not a very pretty picture, and if you think I am exaggerating stand outside one of our main government schools and see the size of the children emerging from there. It really is scary. Our gross domestic product is national disgrace that needs action now, not post kumitati for pity’s sake.
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