Fat chance of seeing sense

10:32am Wednesday 30th April 2008

Comments (2)   Have your say »

AFTER last week's confessions, it's great to discover that scientists have good news for Prezza (and for me, come to that).

Experts in Australia say they've come up with a fat-busting treatment that means you can stuff your face to your heart's content and still lose weight.

It seems that a drug currently used to regulate high blood pressure can boost your metabolism and burn off all the excess calories you're taking in.

At least, they can if you're an over-fed lab rat in Melbourne.

It will take three to five years to prove it works on humans, and get the drug onto chemists' counters so that we First World fatties can make disgusting pigs of ourselves, wasting valuable food resources while shedding our rolls of flab.

And yet, ironically, by that time it's likely we'll have lost all the weight we wanted to lose and then some, as famine spreads across the previously pampered West. There will probably be no food in the shops, because it'll have cost too much in petrol to get it there in the first place.

Still, it's comforting to know that there will be one or two fat cats (or should that be rats?) around. With their mega-million-pound profits, the oil company bosses should still be able to buy themselves the odd Big Mac and fries.

Astonishing to hear them continuing to pretend they're hard up after all that extra cash came rolling in to boost their bottom line.

But it seems we forgot they need to invest so much in finding new sources of fossil fuel and on developing new forms of energy that, well, they can't help it if it costs us £5 a gallon for petrol at the pumps, that the weekly food bill is giving us all a nosebleed and that haulage firms are going out of business.

The oil producers also need to maintain the pension funds they are responsible for, and that costs a fortune these days.

But before you ask, they've got nothing to do with what's been going on in Scotland, where an oil business has been closing its pension fund to new workers.

How much more efficient oil companies (all companies, come to think of it) could be, if only they didn't have to employ workers.

God knows, they try their best not to, because workers are a notoriously awkward lot, with their demands to be paid and looked after.

What these workers need to bear in mind is that companies have their shareholders to satisfy if they want to hold on to them. And shareholders are people too, you know.

The really sad thing is that a lot of them are people like you and me, through the pensions we are taking out to protect us from the poverty-stricken old age we would otherwise face because we can't pay, won't pay enough tax to look after our elderly people properly.

Perhaps a small change of emphasis is called for on the part of our national leaders.

Maybe if the Government could convince us that the enormous duty and VAT rake-off it imposes on fuel would be used towards funding the old-age pension, we might feel less bitter about coughing up at the pumps.

And if ministers had to demonstrate how our taxes were going to help people, rather than boosting Treasury coffers, they might just have to follow through and do it.