Where do you go to find the world’s biggest fast food restaurant and its hosts who rank seventh in the list of the world’s most obese countries?
Weirdly enough, it’s at a place where the world’s fittest people are performing in front of an audience of billions…..yes…..you’ve guessed it…..The 2012 Olympics stadium in London.
While we continue to fill our hospitals with patients suffering from obesity related illnesses and who drain the nation of millions of pounds in prescriptive drugs and therapies, we are, ironically, also supplying state-of-the-art facilities to showcase how we could all become the world’s fastest, highest or longest – if only we could be bothered!
Instead, we would rather exercise our apathy gland by taking part in something akin to a scene from Gladiator; we let the athletes battle it out in the arena, whilst we sit and watch, like Roman Emperors, on our ever spreading backsides, eating fries and burgers from their plastic wrappings.
Of course, without the vast sponsorship provided by the fast food outlets, such spectacles would never be able to take place. Olympic stadiums cost the proceeds from zillions of burgers to build, and the general health of our people is small potatoes when placed against the chance for our nation to upstage the world. As an added extra, there’s always the hope (mainly of over optimistic health gurus) we might become sufficiently motivated after viewing four weeks of the Games, to exercise ourselves, by walking to the fridge for another can of another sponsor’s product.
We could turn our collective backs on such temptations but, frankly, manipulating any part of our bodies seems to become increasingly difficult lately. It’s lucky someone has already invented the remote control.
When the Games are over, and the used packaging has been sent abroad for re-cycling, we can all relax knowing nothing has changed within the NHS and that we all have the opportunity to benefit from the legacy of the Olympics….the remains of the biggest fast food outlet in the world!