This winter, food feels ever more like a minefield. The rich obsess over carbs and gut bacteria, sporting blood sugar monitors as the latest accessory. The poor are trapped on cheap food that has been industrialised beyond recognition. Our supposedly developed world contains the bizarre spectacle of people who are fat yet still hungry.
Luckily, solutions are at hand. In fact, 2024 could be the year we start to turn the tide on obesity. Science is making increasingly clear the ways junk food impacts our biology — and providing new drugs to help. Cash-strapped governments are realising that obesity imposes unacceptable costs on life chances, health systems and productivity. And some brilliant initiatives, in both Europe and America, are demonstrating that we can grip this crisis in ways which may even pay for themselves.
Until now, politicians and doctors have been nervous about telling citizens what to eat. Politicians emphasise freedom and “lifestyle”; doctors I have interviewed have been cynical about whether their patients will ever lose weight. But the belief that people should be free to choose their own poison is increasingly challenged by the evidence that some products are addictive.