Editorial: Fries with that diet?

OPINION: Are the diet police getting out of control?

The flap over a gimmick by a pair of multinational food industry heavyweights, McDonald's and Weight Watchers, makes it feel that way.

The burger chain this week trumpeted that it had managed to tweak the cooking process for a handful of items on its menu so that the calorie intake wouldn't go off the dial for those on the Weight Watchers diet.

Good luck to it. That a weight watcher might now want to eat a fish burger or some processed chicken while sticking to their diet is surely a matter of individual taste and choice.

Predictably though, various campaigners have condemned the thought of people on diets venturing near a fast food restaurant, one likening it to "sending an ex-smoker into a room full of smoke".

Such hyperbole demonstrates a depressing aspect of the debate over so-called obesity in society, the tendency of activists to try to smother individual circumstance and responsibility, and to heap suspicion on anything that differs from their prescription.

There is a clear case for the state to take some leadership around the risks of a sedentary lifestyle and high-fat diet, because the burden becomes the community's if diet-related health problems get out of hand.

But surely each individual's problem is that individual's; issues of weight, diet and body image are deeply personal and complex, and cannot be tackled by guilt-trips, finger-wagging and demonising.

The anti-obesity lecturers, in other words, deserve to be regarded with as much suspicion as the burger baron who claims to be the dieter's new best friend.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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