Every so often a government will get into a frenzy about the health of the population. It's a trend as old as Parliament.

For some inexplicable reason officials become concerned Joe Public is too weak, too lazy or too susceptible to disease.

Bad teeth, brittle bones, pale parlance and any other minor alignment that people have, and have always had, get interpreted as symptomatic of a sinister trend in which the great unwashed stop caring for themselves.

Generally, if one analyses it cynically, these frenzies tend to proceed some kind of military adventure.

Men must be fit when they are needed to die, it seems. Right now, as young boys perish in two lands far away, we have... the obesity epidemic.

"Handle with care," a friend said. "Over-weight people are sensitive. And bigger than you."

But it's time for me to stop holding my tongue and for the fatties to start holding theirs. For me to stand up and say what I think and for them to stand up (from the couch) and think what I say.

Epidemic? That's what grates.

It's the government and media deliberately creating panic for their own ends while allowing the overweight to escape responsibility for the almost entirely self-inflicted fact they can't see their own feet

Epidemic? Like a contagious disease? Like the great plague or bird flu? Like if you're sitting next to a tubby bloke on the bus, rather than just being annoyed because they take up most of the seat, you might actually catch the podge from them?

Being obese isn't an epidemic, it's a lack of self restraint. It doesn't need NHS pills, it needs exercise. It's not solved by surgery, it's solved by stopping eating McDonald's.

What annoys me here is I sound like Littlejohn or my grandad or that worst of all human creatures, the reactionary. But how else to react when it's announced – as this week – that businesses will be paid hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money just to make their fruit stands look more appealing.

Here's a tip: people going into a store for a Dairy Milk aren't going to come out with a Golden Delicious because it's better positioned.

And here's the other annoying thing: if you look around there's not even that many morbidly obese people anyway.

So where's this all come from? Who knows? Everyone's too worried about catching it to care.

Although I suppose, if one analyses it cynically, people who are navel gazing at their own – and other people's – bodies, don't see the fighter jets overhead. While they think they have problems with their weight, they're not thinking about weighty problems.

Probably, just how the governments like it.