As a rule I try not to believe Daily Express headlines. Otherwise I would be constantly distraught by news such as: "SALT BANNED IN CHIP SHOPS" (it isn't), "EU WANTS TO MERGE UK WITH FRANCE" (it doesn't), and "EVERY 4 MINUTES A MIGRANT IS ARRESTED IN BRITAIN" (they really ought to leave that poor bugger alone). The Daily Express is where sanity goes to put its feet up.
A couple of weeks ago, however, there was one Express story I couldn't avoid reading: "GORGE ON YOUR FAVOURITE FOOD AND STAY SLIM".
Apparently the gene which causes us to store excess calories as fat has been identified. Switch that off and we can all lie face down in the Pringles for as long as we like. Now weirdly for a Daily Express health story, I imagine this one contains more than a sliver of truth: gene therapies are very much the thing, and given the scale of the obesity epidemic there are clearly oceans of cash to be made from coming up with a magic bullet.
As a man who has not so much battled his weight over the years as fought a long and bloody war full of scorched earth policies and spirit-sapping sieges, you might imagine I'd be all for this. Woo! And Hoo! Pop a pill and then gorge on what you like. Except I'm not thrilled by the prospect, not at all. It's just plain wrong.
There are two reasons. The first is moral. There's much hand-wringing over food waste and rightly so; all the food wasted each year in North America and Europe is equivalent to all the food produced in sub-Saharan Africa. That's clearly obscene. But those statistics do not take into consideration all that food wasted by over-consumption. And yes, I recognise that I am both prosecution and the accused; that I have eaten more than mine and a few other peoples' fair shares over the years. It's an issue. Given this, a drug that makes it possible to just carry on scarfing is not one of those things worth filing under the heading "good ideas".
But there's another point: if it's suddenly possible to eat anything without risk to your waistline then a huge chunk of the fun leaks out of dinner time. Sure there's a whole bunch of stuff you can eat until the well-marbled cows come home. I am told salads can be nice in the right circumstances. But the real pleasure of eating lies in the naughty; in those things which, taken in excess, are the most direct route to an aortic aneurism. I bang on about pork belly because I do really like it. But I don't eat it every day because that would be stupid and I do try not to be that. Which means that when I do get to eat it, there is the intense joy of delayed gratification.
I have other vices. I have vices like Greece has debts. Occasionally I eat pork scratchings and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. I have eaten the bacon double Swiss from Burger King and found it not unpleasant. Drunk, I have eaten kebabs from places that shouldn't be allowed to sell them, and opened a second family bag of Revels as dessert. I am not proud of these things, but I am honest. I have enjoyed the intense buzz of being very, very bad. And that's what the fat pill would rob me of: not merely the extra inches on my waist, but the true pleasure of the profane. I hope to God it never happens.
