aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Fat Brits

Yesterday I pointed to Minette Marrin in the Times Online calling Michael Moore fat (actually, she called him grotesquely fat).

Apparently that’s a sensitive subject in the UK today because the Brits are getting fatter fast:

Two just-released reports show that the number of obese adults in Britain has tripled since 1980, earning it the distinction of being the fattest country in Europe.

Government officials and health experts are suitably alarmed, and anxious to find ways to turn more Brits from fat to fit. Britain’s health secretary, Alan Johnson, calls the obesity epidemic a “potential crisis on the scale of climate change.”

How fat are they?

ADULT OBESITY
Rates as a percentage of the total population:
US 30.6
Britain 23.0
Slovakia 22.4
Greece 21.9
Australia 21.7
Hungary 18.8
Czech Republic 14.8
Canada 14.3
Spain 13.1
Germany 12.9
Finland 12.8
Turkey 12.0
Belgium 11.7
Netherlands 10.0
Sweden 9.7
France 9.4
Switzerland 7.7
Japan 3.2

(Source: Health Profile of England 2007, with data from the World Health Organization’s June 2007 Health For All Database.)

The U.S. remains the fat champion of the world. Could it be because we mistake portion size for quality?