Spare us from spoilt health lobbyists who want it their way or no way

Monday March 21, 2011

Martin Cullip argues that the health lobby is becoming ever more extreme. Politicians should start standing up for the simple pleasures of ordinary people.

McDonald’s in the United States has recently come under fire from health advocates over a new breakfast menu item added to their range in late 2010.

A food activist at the New York Times labelled it “expensive junk food”, whilst other critics weighed in to lambast the company for its recklessness. On the Internet, McDonald’s enemies tripped over each other in roundly condemning what they saw as irresponsibility driven by profiteering.

If you’re picturing a fat-laden dish of Rabelaisian proportions here, you’d be wrong. Their anger was directed at ‘Fruit & Maple Oatmeal’, a breakfast containing just 4.5 grams of fat, plenty of fibre, fresh fruit, and a modest 290 calories – half that of much of their morning fare.

One might assume that the chain would have been congratulated for such a move, but in attempting to placate the health lobby, their mistake was to make it tasty instead of plain, presumably not ensuring that customers wore a hair shirt while eating it.

In a similar vein, six health campaigning organisations announced this week that they are withdrawing their support for the Coalition Government’s health responsibility deal with food and drinks industries, despite concessions already made including reduction of alcohol content for certain products, lessening salt and sugar in foods, calorie labeling, and a ban on drinks advertising around schools.

Their justification was that they weren’t prepared to work with any entity which doesn’t fully share their single-minded mission. They are adamant that it is to be their way, or the highway.

We are now firmly in an era where health lobbyists no longer look to encourage and persuade in their quest for healthier lifestyles, but rather set an extreme agenda and belligerently issue their demands in support of it. Every new directive is accompanied by dire warnings of an impending epidemic, with each proposed tweak to the rules bringing ever-diminishing returns yet being trumpeted with an ever-escalating urgency.

Despite alcohol consumption continually declining, and our diets increasingly becoming healthier, the paradoxical response from health extremists is to insist aggressively on more legislation, restrictions, and bans, backed up by doomsday rhetoric bordering on psychological terrorism.

Sadly, we can trace the roots of this health arrogance directly to politicians and governments worldwide. In attempting to do what they think is right by their citizens, they have completely lost touch with how people wish to live their lives. By legislating to save us from ourselves, they have encouraged a health industry – which was once benignly helpful – to steamroller the public’s freedom to choose by way of cajoling and bullying instead of education and persuasion.

It is in the nature of health lobbyists to talk of costs whilst ignoring benefits, but the role of politicians should be to weigh up both before committing to policies which will adversely affect the lives of their electorate. If they overstep the mark, it is government’s job to admonish them for it. The evident sense of untouchable authority exhibited by the health lobby shows that government have plainly not been doing so for the last decade at least.

As a result, their accession to every utopian dream of the health-obsessed is actively detracting from overall enjoyment of life, while simultaneously encouraging the pressure groups to be bolder, more demanding, and more threatening.

Philip Davies MP, as he has done before, recently described those who push for ever more draconian health regulation as “impossible to satisfy”, and on current evidence they are. However, there is a way that their extremism can be dampened, and that is for politicians to realise that they should be standing up for their public in resisting proposals which impinge unfairly – and even unhealthily – on the quiet enjoyment of everyday life.

Just as government doesn’t deal with terrorists, they should similarly be giving short shrift to threats and intimidation by spoilt health lobbyists who are increasingly unwilling to compromise.