Obesity is not a disability
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Version 0 of 1. Is obesity a disability or a choice gone awry? Danish child-minder Karsten Kaltoft was fired from his job because he was too overweight – at 25 stone – to tie a child's shoe laces. He is suing for discrimination. His case will he heard by the European court of justice in Luxembourg today. If Kaltoft is successful, the ruling will be binding throughout the EU. Employers will be required to treat overweight employees as disabled and therefore requiring special treatment – priority parking, for instance, and sturdy furniture – and they will be unable to fire them for being overweight. (I will not say "fat". Eating disorder professionals do not say fat because they know that compulsive eating and anorexia are twins, and dependent on self-hatred to thrive.) The right will scream that this is special treatment for "fat" people – they probably will say "fat", not being eating disorder professionals, or even particularly kindly – who choose to be "fat" even if now they regret it, and have to be cut from their homes by emergency workers. On your bike, and so forth. Eat some kale. This is a story about addiction. Sugar is more dangerous than the drugs we are taught to fear. Of course it is harder to wrestle with sugar – who can live without food? We eat three times more sugar than we did 50 years ago. It is obviously addictive, and marketed at children by cartoon characters and other grotesques. These overweight children, of which a too-large proportion are poor, because bad food is cheap and swift and delicious, will grow to be overweight adults, and these overweight adults will die too young. Why is there no government ban on sugar advertising, you may ask? Don't be stupid. Dave Lewis, an executive at Unilever – which sells, among other things, Solero, Cornetto, Pot Noodle, Magnum and Viennetta, as well as Carte D'Or, Ben & Jerry's, Wall's, Peperami and Marmite – chaired the Conservatives' public health commission. McDonald's and Coca-Cola sponsored the London Olympics, an act so cynical and destructive it seemed deliberately designed to kill satire, among other things. McDonald's, particularly, is gifted in marketing duplicity. Its "restaurant" in the Olympic park was decorated with words like "succulent" blown up to obesity to mislead. Now it is giving fruit away with Happy Meals: children, embrace the pious maker of the McFlurry! Embrace your saviour! What to do? The problem, as always when discussing addiction, is denial: the government's denial, which is ideological; the people's denial, which is comprehensive; and the addict's denial, which is lethal. (The food industry's denial is mere professional profiteering, and to be expected.) Since I do not expect the government to emerge from denial any time soon, or the food industry ever, let us move to the addict's denial. Denial, at least partially – and here I address the hateful puddle of "libertarian" pundits and lobbyists directly, even as they sharpen their pencils to denounce Kaltoft as his own destroyer – is the reason overweight people sometimes need the walls of their homes broken down, and the reason why they continue to overeat when they can no longer bend down to tie a shoelace, or rise to face a mirror. Denial fuels some elements of the fat acceptance movement, which is right when it says that overweight people suffer discrimination, and wrong when it says there is no physical threat from overeating. Denial is both the essential element of addiction and the reason that non-addicts often misunderstand and despise the condition. If the addict says it is a choice to overeat, who are you, or I, to disagree? The solution is dull, slow and not in the law. Mental health provision is scandalously small; misunderstanding of addiction is endemic; responsible advertising is a fantasy; food is over-processed; society is unequal; cruelty is rife. I have much sympathy for Kaltoft, but I do not think that calling him disabled will lengthen his life or help him to not eat himself to death. I think it is more likely that a friendly ruling will compound his denial and enrage the rest. (The disability advocacy charity Scope asked its Facebook and Twitter followers if obesity is a disability. The response was negative). It would be state-sponsored, continent-wide denial; it would be madness. Twitter: @TanyaGold1 |