Kevin Myers: Greg Critser's book Fat Land is about the US today - and unless we do something, it's about ourselves in 10 years' time. The McGeneration is well and truly established in Ireland.
If you doubt that, visit any of the suburban shopping malls on the little America that has grown around the M50, and you will see McIreland: obese children with sweat on with upper lips, with two or three McChins, and huge McBellies, while their mothers are cultivating that curiously American form of fatness, the McHaunch, the dimension between the top of the buttock and the front of the groin. Used to be US, and now it's us.
The assault on thinness has come from two directions: from the use of high fructose corn syrup in soft drinks, and the trend towards "supersizing" fast food portions. HFCS is far cheaper than cane sugar, but it appears to go directly to the liver, rather than being broken down in the system beforehand, as dextrose or sucrose are. This means that (a) really large amounts of soft drinks are much cheaper; and (b) they're more fattening.
Supersizing is the real villain of the piece. Essentially, it is based on the notion that the human appetite will grow in proportion to the food available to it. Lowering the price of a meal will not lower sales, merely ensure that, provided the concept is handled correctly, sales will actually increase.
The Critser figures are numbingly awful. A serving of McDonald's chips (yes, they're still chips in the yesteryear of this column) contained 200 calories in 1960. Now it contains 650 calories. A 590-calorie meal became 1,550 calories. By 1990, heavy users - people who ate fast food meals 20 times a month or more: ahhhh, the sick bag, the sick bag - spent $66 billion on fast food.
The result is what you see across the US, and are beginning to see in Ireland: thighs that resemble two copulating hippotamuses, and knees that are like ships in the night; buttocks that wobble like a pair of dead pigs in some sacking; and arms covered in folds of fat in which you could conceal a tea service.
How do these people stay clean? No shower cubicle is large enough; and if they got into a bath they'd never get out. Do they stand outside fire stations and get the crews to hose them down? And on this question of hygiene, you might not want to continue reading on from here. Indeed, I advise that you shouldn't. But how do these people go to the lavatory? Where do they find a seat which take their weight? Listen: it gets worse, so at this point, head for sports or the business pages.
Good. Now that I'm alone, let me wonder aloud: when they have a bowel movement, what emerges? Do they have to flush the lavatory several times before they are finished? And how do they - ah, yes, I'm rather glad I'm alone for this one - manage to reach around to clean themselves? Have they special fat people's lavatories, where they wipe one another? Or do they employ little immigrants from Asia using ladders and long-handled brushes and face-masks to do this? Ah yes, the good taste corner that is An Irishman's Diary.
Fat Land shows that markets work properly only when there is a free flow of information. Governments in a free market have to ensure that people can know what is bad for them, without having to fight for the information. Governments also have the right to tax substances which cause a burden on state resources.
Governments tax alcohol and tobacco because, well, they want the money - but also because consumers of these products are a drain on medical services. So are consumers of fat. And there are measures that governments can take, either through that otiose lump of flaccidity which is the EU, or at national level (and I no longer know where power on such matters resides).
Why should taxes not be levied on all fast-food products that contain proportions of fat above a certain level? Fast food is easily defined: it is sold through a self-service outlet; ordinary restaurants would be immune to the law. A fat tax would be an incentive to reduce the amounts of fat in the foods and it would also drive up the price of fatty products. HFCS should also be highly taxed, to encourage manufacturers of soft drinks to return to other, safer sugars.
It should be illegal to sell any fast food without clearly declaring its calorie content; and it should be totally illegal to advertise fast foods and snacks during children's television programmes. The free market doesn't allow children to see pornography they don't understand, so it certainly shouldn't allow them be duped by advertisements that they most certainly do understand because they've been made by the finest marketing minds in the world.
You can't control satellite television, goes the argument. You can, actually. You can have national laws which will prevent planning permissions for any company whose affiliates advertise fast-food products, including soft drinks, on children's television by satellite. You can have EU laws that will authorise discrimination against companies which break the law in letter or spirit.
If adults want to get fat, that's their right; but they should pay for it. But not even parents have the right to allow their own children to get corpulent. If the fat tax doesn't work, we'll just have to have the obesity police patrolling shopping centres, culling overweight infants using humane killers. Either or. Take your pick.