"Obesity is not a disease of the voracious, but of the most vulnerable, poor and uneducated."

My good, no wonder we are not making any inroads if this is what health workers think.

You may give up YOUR freedom, Amy, not mine and please do not include me in your stupid notion of "nation" - there is no such thing, you must have watched too many hours of poisonous propaganda!

Addiction addiction addiction is the problem. The obsessive nature of the human will raise it's ugly head always. Obsession towards war, food, drugs, money, sex, gay marriage, religion, non-religion, each other, saving chooks...the list of human obsessions is endless sadly...no hope for fat people exists unltill a new "drug" to combat addiction arrives.

It isn't what people eat, it is the amount of food people eat that causes them to become obese. You can exercise all you like, but why not just eat that little bit less. Cut out the morning and afternoon tea and supper, don't snack while you watch TV. Don't buy soft drinks, for the sake of your children's health.

The government can't make gluttons show restraint in what they eat, they have to do it themselves. It is mainly in poorer countries where incomes are low and food is scarce that obesity is not a problem.

Shops that sell food should have big slightly concave mirrors at the checkouts so that customers will see what they will become after they eat all the food in their trolleys.

David

It's just no accident that most of our obese people are also the least well off; which is the real "big issue" needing addressing as our most urgent single issue imperative!

And how do we do that by adding the GST to healthy unprocessed food?Or indeed, saddle the less well off, with a "great big" new tax?

WE need something beside simplistic thinking to actually address this "big issue"?

God save us from complex rationalists who leave university with no real world experience and a headful of untried and usually fundamentally flawed intellectual concepts?

Real genius lies in solving complex problems with simple fail safe, tried and not found wanting, solutions.

Like say, a cap and tax carbon solution?

Where is it written that one must have an ETS and additional billions earned by paper shuffling broker barons, to also have a cap?

With only that emission above the progressively lowered cap copping a penalty?

Allowing plenty of time and forewarning for those who want to avoid the penalty?

If everything that leaves these shores had some value adding added, we'd do two things; earn more export dollars and put everybody into reasonably well paid jobs!? More general income, less obesity?

Service industries (education finance) are just not safe as Britain found out to her immense cost at the start of the GFC!

And by embracing lower costing carbon free power options like say cheaper than coal thorium, connecting to micro-grids; we'd be able to do more of that value adding, as well as invite the energy dependent high tech industries to join the queue waiting to relocate to these shores?

Plus the hundreds of thousands of cashed up self funded retirees all needing basic low skill services, being fleeced yet again by debt laden, cash strapped, European Governments, devoid of creative or even new ideas?

But particularly if tax reform and vast simplification were part of the mix?

As we'd create if a single, stand alone, unavoidable expenditure tax were the adopted reform?
Rhrosty.

And what's worse beer and wine are chock full of calories-kilojoules - never on the label.

Are there any pleasures to live for?