I’ll come clean. Be honest. I just went to McDonalds!l But it was for ‘a study’, nothing to do with eating. Ok, if you count ice cream, then we did ‘eat’. And the study was conducted whilst waiting for someone to download two streams of ice-cream into two cups. So, about 20 minutes in all.

You see, my wife and I are pretentious, middle-class health fiends, who ‘eat well’ and ‘exercise properly’, so visiting McDonalds without the excuse of grandchildren is simply unacceptable. Except for ice-cream. Which they do soooooo well.

Of course, the reality is that I’d eat Maccy-Ds every day. There was a time when I practically did. Then went virtually cold turkey (not the wrap, the giving up addictions thing) when my cholesterol was apparently middlin-to-high. Now I miss it, every day. But there ya go. So now, we get ice creams if we’re ‘nearby’ on a sunny day. And if we’re not nearby, we’ll travel up to 73 miles to get near enough to qualify.

So I ordered and I stood, looking at the numbers change on the collection board. And I looked around me and thought: ‘you’re fat’. ‘Oh, so are you’. ‘And your children’. ‘Blimey, look at the size of her!’ ‘That child should not be eating 3 Big Macs. He’s 7’.

And that was my ‘study’. I studied a group of typical McDonalds patrons. And found at least 57% to be ‘obese’, a further 19% to be ‘morbidly obese’ and at least 7% to be ‘JESUS!!!! Look at the size of THATTTTT!!!!’ And I thought: Houston; we have a problem.

I was standing there watching the future A&E waiting rooms of our local hospitals. The diabetics, the heart attacks, the… fat fucks who can’t move without help. The NHS will collapse under the weight of its chocolate milk shakes.

If you look at a rank ordering of countries by percentage of obesity; Britain sits (because it’s now almost impossible for it to stand) 55th. Out of 200. The nations at the top are ones you’ve never heard of, generally in the South Pacific where possibly, there are genetic influences, as they’re all bit inbred over there so they can go to New Zealand and play in the front row for the All Blacks.

America is high up the list, as you’d expect from the nation which invented fast food, fast women and President Trump. Then, basically, the list follows the ‘richer you are the fatter you are’ correlation very strongly. Except for Japan. Very rich, very thin. And we can discount them anyway because who the fuck wants to eat raw fish every day? Then the low, thin end of the list, is the very poor countries because they are half starved, literally. Ethiopia is the least obese nation on Earth, so I think we should get all the fatties out of McDonalds and send them to Addis Ababa for a couple years to do something ‘shedding’.

Or, if I were in a government desperate for the nation to lose weight, for both their own health and that of our health service, yet desperate for money, I’d weigh everyone once a year and tax every lb overweight they are. Then we could embrace and enjoy our overly hefty brethren rather than resent them for the burden they’ll become.

Happy dieting Sunday

A xxxx