IT'S an ominous time for fatties. The response to the first SA National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey suggests that they're next on the dreaded nanny agenda.
The survey results certainly are grim. "Sick, fat and sad," one newspaper screamed about findings that six out of every ten women older than 50 are so dik that they're at significant risk of a lifestyle disease, 22% of toddlers aged between two and five are overweight or obese compared to 12% in the US, one in two women and one in three men under the age of 40 are hopelessly unfit . . . you get the picture.
And if you didn't, there was a photograph. Nothing reinforces middle class prejudices about the poor and the conviction that something must be done to help them quite like a close-up of rolls of lard on a fat woman's back.
We're at risk of diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, cancers and God knows what else. Perhaps it's more accurate to suggest we're a country with a cash-strapped working class. It's not rocket science. Times are hard, pennies are few, so the poor eat rubbish. Eating healthy is a luxury.
But most of us, according to the survey, know we're overweight. What's more, about 95% of us are convinced we're in goodish health. And we probably are - provided, of course, we don't do something stupid like run up and down a field in the blazing sun to qualify for a crack at being a metro cop.
However, the spoilers are standing by. The Human Sciences Research Council warns that we may not be as healthy as we believe because, as one report put it, "many [of us] might not have been diagnosed with disease or post-traumatic stress disorder. One in ten people suffer from mental illness caused by mental illness caused by trauma or exposure to violence."