Government sponsored obesity?

Yeah, we get it, everyone is getting fatter, we are all going to die with dribbles of lard from the corner of our mouths after a fatal heart attack facilitated by clogged arteries and type II diabetes. The thing is, if the UK government is really behind tackling obesity then where are the proactive measures, where are the subsidised gym memberships for the unemployed and where can people get real access to dietary information that is based on fact? I’m not talking about ‘traffic lights’ or the extreme musings of the mad, poo-poking pretender that is Gillian McKeith.

So the government isn’t being proactive enough, but the last thing I thought would happen is for them to take a role in making it worse, let alone take money for it! But this is the exact scenario that greeted me today when I boarded a London bus near my house. The reverse of my bus ticket revealed something I had not noticed before, McDonalds vouchers for cheap fast food deals.

My bus ticket

Now, I realise that the government advertises this kind of thing all the time, just take one look at the billboards on the tube for example and you are likely to see some kind of fast food advertising but in my opinion a clear line has been crossed with my bus ticket. This is mainly due to the financial incentive offered by McDonalds due to my purchase and the general ‘in-your-face-ness’ of it all.

You wouldn’t catch a public limited company acting like this, they have to answer to various stakeholders  and any contradicting messages would be seen as a bad way to do business (it’s like Apple promoting software that only runs on PCs). My question is, as the public aren’t we stakeholders in the government’s decisions and as such entitled to a say in something like this? Ummm, yeaaahhhh riiiiiiighttt…