Tax the fat: a rough guide to the economics of obesity

<p>It seems the British people just can't stop piling on the pounds. You've seen the newspaper headlines: "Britain's Obesity Timebomb", "Half of Britons Obese by 2050", etc., etc. The United States may be "the fat man of the world", but the UK is definitely a podgy cousin, with around one person in four classified as medically obese. Across the Channel in svelte France, by contrast, less than one person in ten is obese, while in Japan it's less than one in twenty.</p>