The soaring cost of treating obesity-related conditions is the single biggest threat to Western health services. It costs the UK alone £47bn a year, equivalent to almost half of the NHS budget. Part of the problem, as we all know, is that people don’t get enough exercise any more. A comparison of survey data from 1967 and 2010 shows that people back then were both slimmer and more ready to tackle the problem. All but 7% of those who considered themselves overweight in the 1967 survey had tried to do something about it; only about half of those interviewed in 2010 had. One reason obesity is such a problem today, in other words, is people “just aren’t bothering to lose weight”: they don’t care. That has to change. If the NHS is to survive, obesity, like smoking, needs to become “socially unacceptable”. (Max Pemberton, The Daily Telegraph)

I suppose an Epicurean way of looking at this issue is that if being over-weight makes people happy, and if they enjoy eating unhealthy food and sitting in front of the television for untold hours, then who is to judge them? They are happy. That is what matters. Eventually (actually, quite soon) they will be in the majority and no one will make them feel uncomfortable or guilty about their weight.

Why do I feel uncomfortable about this? Is it just the early deaths and the public cost?

Yesterday, the US House of Representatives failed to pass a key element of a package of bills that would have given Obama the ability to fast-track a trade deal with Pacific-Rim nations (TPP), and by inference the Eurean version (TTIP). This might prove a temporary setback, but it is a sign of the growing backlash against both trade deals This is what George Monbiot wrote recently in The Guardian:

“Investor-state rules could be used to smash any attempt to save the NHS from corporate control, to re-regulate the banks, to curb the greed of the energy companies, to renationalise the railways, to leave fossil fuels in the ground. These rules shut down democratic alternatives. They outlaw leftwing politics. This is why there has been no attempt by the UK government to inform us about this monstrous assault on democracy, let alone consult us…Wake up, people we’re being shafted.”

Aside from the above, the secrecy about these deals is astounding and undemocratic. Taking the Senate floor recently, Barbara Boxer shared her story about trying to read the TPP’s text:

As soon as I get there, the guard says to me ‘hand over your electronics.’ OK. I gave over my electronics. Then the guard says ‘You can’t take notes.’ I said ‘I can’t take notes?!’ ‘Well, you can take notes, but you have to give them back to me and I’ll put them in a file.’ So I said ‘Wait a minute, I’m going to take notes, and then you’re going to take my notes away from me? And then you’re going to have them in a file and you can read my notes?'”

Thus, an elected official can’t make notes, can’t make real public criticisms, and it emerges that the President’s advisors are not even up to date on changes to the deal. And we’re supposed to believe that this deal is being negotiated in the best interests of the American and European people?

These trade deals are actually good only for corporations, and thus offend against Epicurean principles of justice and a level playing field for everyone. Obama is being either naive or devious. Whichever one it is, I for one don’t like it.