“WE’VE just gotten too darn fat,” US health secretary Tommy Thompson said last week. “Overweight and obesity are literally killing us.” His remarks followed publication of figures in The Journal of the American Medical Association showing that a staggering 64 per cent of the US population is now clinically overweight or obese.
The figures reveal that obesity is close to overtaking tobacco as the leading cause of death in the US. In 2000 it killed 400,000 Americans, a third more than in 1990, and just 35,000 short of deaths linked to smoking. That mountain of flab helps to trigger a…
