The world has officially gone fat mad

This Op-Ed by David McFadden of Australis needs no comment:

When fatness becomes madness

THE world has officially gone mad…. Someone in a position of authority recommended that children as young as four be weighed on arrival at kindergarten to curb the obesity "crisis". Call me old-fashioned, but further marginalising fat kids at an age when their peers display an apparently innate cruelty is not a good idea. What will we do with those who do not meet the arbitrary body mass index? Send them to kiddie fat camps?

A relative used to tell my curvaceous cousins that the doors would have to be widened if they did not stop putting on weight - and this to prepubescent girls…. My relative's brand of mean-spirited taunts now hides behind "concern" for our "health", but this is not about health - it's about appearance….

The word hereditary rarely crops up in the obesity debate, despite overwhelming evidence that any health condition and body type is 95 percent hereditary. As a society we want to assign blame. If you are fat it is your fault: you are slovenly, lazy, undisciplined. A dietitian will dispute this assertion, but society isn't having it. It has gone so far that a television show recently polled viewers on whether Santa was too fat….

He goes on to talk about when he had a gig as Santa at a shopping mall and for weeks kept track of how many fat and thin people came in and out of the fast food joint across the hall. Read to learn if his (nonscientific) observations confirmed the hype that two-thirds of us are undisciplined fatties.