obesity

Could Ozempic bankrupt the NHS?

1 June 2024 9:00 am

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?

25 May 2024 9:00 am

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?

31 July 2021 9:00 am

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

17 July 2021 8:41 am

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

17 October 2020 9:00 am

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

8 August 2020 9:00 am

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

8 August 2020 9:00 am

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

8 August 2020 9:00 am

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

8 August 2020 9:00 am

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

1 August 2020 9:00 am

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

1 August 2020 9:00 am

One of the genuine pleasures I always take in arriving back in the north-east after being in London is that…

President Trump and Speaker Pelosi

Pelosi goes full Trump

20 May 2020 8:10 am

Speaker Nancy Pelosi skipped the sugarcoating and punched the President in the gut on Monday. Trump had announced to the…

A Chinook helicopter prepares to drop sandbags onto the dam wall at the Toddbrook reservoir last week (Getty)

Dams, lives and statistics: the worst dam collapses in Britain

10 August 2019 9:00 am

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?

15 December 2018 9:00 am

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

15 December 2018 9:00 am

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

24 March 2018 9:00 am

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

9 September 2017 9:00 am

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

7 September 2017 1:00 pm

The good news is that Theresa May has dropped the threat to withdraw universal free school meals. Thank God (and…

Roxane Gay: ruminative, repetitive and solipsistic

A cacophony of complaint

29 July 2017 9:00 am

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

15 July 2017 9:00 am

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

4 June 2016 9:00 am

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?

5 December 2015 9:00 am

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

17 October 2015 8:00 am

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’

6 June 2015 9:00 am

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

6 June 2015 9:00 am

I wrote last week about a swarm of bees that had attached itself to a wall of my house, as…