obesity
Could Ozempic bankrupt the NHS?
The NHS spends around £6.5 billion every year treating obesity. People who are overweight cost the health service twice as…
Are ultra-processed foods really so bad?
Last week saw a flurry of media reports, of whose headlines one of the worst preceded one of the best…
Am I alone in not wanting to download the Covid app?
As I begin, I’m tortured by the doo-do-doo-do of The Twilight Zone’s theme music. I’ve hurtled back in time. Suddenly…
A salt and sugar tax doesn’t make much sense
What is the point of the National Food Strategy? When Henry Dimbleby was hired as Britain’s ‘food tsar’ several years…
Covid has killed off our civil liberties
It started with smoking. The 1960s and 1970s saw little popular objection to legislation restricting advertisements by private companies purveying…
What we can learn from Sweden
It is a particular pleasure to be returning to the columns of The Spectator, more than half a century after…
Mixed messages about body weight are nothing new
Tackling obesity is the latest government initiative, universally condemned as nannying. Ask a Spartan. From an early age, Spartan children…
Letters: How to slim down the nation
Peer review Sir: A neat solution to the levels of inactivity of some members of the House of Lords (‘Peer…
We are living in a post-truth society
Activists wish to change the name of a school in north London because it is named after a road which…
Portrait of the week: Second wave fears, cash for cyclists and a cat catches Covid
Home At a few hours’ notice, the government removed Spain from the list of countries from which it was possible…
Fat-shaming didn’t do me any harm
One of the genuine pleasures I always take in arriving back in the north-east after being in London is that…
Pelosi goes full Trump
Speaker Nancy Pelosi skipped the sugarcoating and punched the President in the gut on Monday. Trump had announced to the…
Dams, lives and statistics: the worst dam collapses in Britain
Dams, lives and statistics The town of Whaley Bridge, Derbyshire, was evacuated after heavy rainfall caused the partial collapse of…
Are we really going to abandon Brexit because of a Mars bar shortage?
The nice French doctor looked beadily at the screen. There were the results of my tests, in irrefutable detail. They…
The best thing about Christmas in France? It’s all over in a day
Just back from a few days in Rome — the perfect small metropolis for ‘street-haunting’, as Cyril Connolly described his…
I’d rather be fat-shamed than have cancer
Sofie Hagen is a young Danish comic I admire. I didn’t see her most recent show, Dead Baby Frog, but…
The fat tax fallacy
James Cracknell, the athlete turned anti-obesity campaigner, was the subject of sniggering and derision in April when he said that…
Our big fat problem
The good news is that Theresa May has dropped the threat to withdraw universal free school meals. Thank God (and…
A cacophony of complaint
What sort of monster gives a bad review to a book by someone who was gang raped as a 12-year-old…
I nourish my dream of a fat pill
As good conversation should, the talk meandered from the serious to the playful. One of the serious topics was overseas…
Stop lecturing fatties – it’s really not their fault
I’ve noticed for some time now that thin people, genuinely slim ones, have a secret loathing of fatties. Kindly though…
Fat-shaming works. Why else would I heave myself up and down hills for hours every day?
We have been contemplating moving to the North, for a variety of unassailable reasons. One is the chance to gloat…
Socrates and Galen on the Great British Bake Off
As the national girth expands by the second, Auntie, never backward about lecturing us on the topic, continues to glory…
The big fat myths of our ‘obesity epidemic’
Obesity isn’t soaring, and it doesn’t strain the NHS
Living next door to someone rich, and beside a motorway, makes you fat and your blood pressure soar
I wrote last week about a swarm of bees that had attached itself to a wall of my house, as…
