FAT, flab, adipose tissue: call it what you will, it is one of the great obsessions of our age. In the early 1980s, stories about obesity were running in the world’s major English-language media at the modest rate of about one per week. By 2003, reports sociologist Abigail Saguy from the University of California at Los Angeles, the figure had expanded to nearly 20 per day. We are in the throes of an unprecedented “obesity epidemic”, doctors, scientists and health organisations repeatedly tell us.
Well, people certainly have been getting fatter in many countries. But here’s the conundrum: overall health…
