Dialogue: Be afraid? Not me. Eat, drink and be merry

Twenty-five years ago, I would have guffawed and fallen about after tuning in on a CNN discussion about the problem of obesity in India. The Indian national image then was of Gandhi-like stick figures in loincloths the size of your handkerchief eschewing food and sex to liberate their souls; skinny guys called fakirs lounging around on beds of four-inch nails, sharp ends up, to get in tune with their God.

But there it was the other night - a smiling, obliging, fully rounded Indian "expert" explaining that fatness was becoming a plague in her country, worse among women than men.

So India is now "civilised," and Western culture marches inexorably around the world. You wonder about the human race when global television offers news stories on the one hand of people dying from starvation and on the other of people dying slowly by choice from a surfeit of food.

The same night of the Indian debate on fatness, TV One had a piece on obesity in New Zealand, showing a number of guys with circumference munching meat pies as they walked along the street. Against this background, Health Ministry chief Karen Poutasi gave us a "Be afraid!" warning of the dangers of feasting at Christmas. Anyone with common sense knows it's balderdash that feasting over the holidays will make a slim person fat.

And anyway, it's commerce that feeds obesity. Poutasi's lonely, pointless voice will remain unheard against the cacophony of television and radio exhortations to eat, eat and eat again. Magazines, newspapers and billboards leave no doubt that modern Western society is obsessed by food and alcoholic beverages. You have only to go to Third World or former communist Eastern Europe to notice less advertising, fewer fast food outlets and fewer fat people.

If smokers are to be mercilessly taxed because they put a harsher financial strain on the health services, then so should food promoters and fatties.

The only good advice about food and drink is not to have too much of anything, except at Christmastime and perhaps on your birthday. Health experts may bridle at this but they don't have much of a track record.

I had an epiphany about experts 10 years ago, sitting on the beach slapping sunblock on my face and pulling on my shirt and hat, remembering how the fact once gambolled in my mind that the sun was the fount of life, the warming, sap-stirring creator of all energy. Mothers nagged their children to "Go outside and play," so we'd baste ourselves with coconut oil and go and get cooked.

But now I know that not much sun is too much, that its carcinogenic rays are lethal and trigger basal cells - those tiny, hard-to-find blisters on my face and arms that threaten premature death unless they're regularly blitzed off.

Skinny little kids were packed off to health camps to bask in the summer and fatten up on meat and dairy products. My father once told me the reason for delinquency in American cities such as New York was because children lived in tenements in streets shaded by tall buildings from the sun's beneficent vitamin D. Their parents couldn't tell them, "Go outside and play" because it was too dangerous out there from not enough sun, and too many cars, sexual predators and muggers. So they grew up etiolated, physically and mentally stunted. So my father said.

Another fact my parents would proudly relate was the reason New Zealand butter was so yellow was it absorbed the sun's healthy rays and therefore was "good for you," unlike the pale butter from other countries where cows were shut up in barns without exercise or fresh green grass to eat.

Simultaneously, I was being force-fed milk each day at school on the advice of experts to make me healthy. And all the time, we were all told we didn't know how lucky we were to live in this safe, healthy and comfortable land.

On the command "Go outside and play" we usually went across the road to the beach for unsupervised swimming, for tunnelling in the sandhills and tree-climbing in the pine plantation behind the sandhills. I got caught in an undertow once and didn't panic because of my immense and - I now understand - totally misguided confidence in the water; and another time I fell out of a tree and saw stars when I hit the ground, and the stars kept coming back on and off for a couple of days.

And we used to play cowboys and Indians among the trees with BB guns - spring-loaded rifles that pumped out small metal pellets. One Indian at school lost an eye when a cowboy hit him firing from behind the butterbox that was his covered wagon. Our guns were all confiscated for a month to teach us a lesson. I can't remember what the lesson was.

When I was fighting I'd eat nothing but steak for two days before a bout to give me the protein I needed for stamina. None of your poofterish fruit and veg. And when I was running and playing rugby I was told not to run too far because it sapped my strength but to concentrate on "interval training" which was to run like hell till you were puffed and then rest before running hard till you were puffed again.

The moral is don't let the experts nag you down. Use your common sense and remember that when kids are thrown on their own resources they build up resourcefulness.

Merry Christmas!