A few months ago, a friend with a gift for astute social observation rang me up on his cellphone from a mall near Albany, N.Y. “Man, you should see the people here. Some of them are so fat they’re in wheelchairs,” he said. “Americans are getting so fat that one day they won’t be able to breed,” he went on, not letting me get a word in. “Fat is going to go down in history for us like lead in the pipes was for the Romans.”

Well, that might be a bloated statement, but it’s a point of view that appears to be shared by the Western health establishment, which treats fat as an epidemic of massive proportions. Officials estimate that six out of 10 people in the U.S., where the mania is greatest, are overweight – if not obese. A report published in the March issue of The New England Journal of Medicine speculated that obesity could soon lead to 300,000 untimely deaths each year in the U.S. alone.

While this menacing report may sound credible to those of us familiar with the repulsive image, commonly seen at food courts, of T-shirts stretched over blubber like a drum skin, there’s a problem with all this fear mongering. Politicians, researchers, health agencies and weight-loss companies want us to believe that we’re all just a Big Mac or two shy of being classified as obese. In a Toronto Star report, Ontario’s new Health Promotion Minister Jim Watson put it best saying, “Obesity is the challenge of the 21st century, just as smoking was the challenge of the 20th century.” New public policy has largely bypassed the beyond-salvation middle-aged in favour of nipping fat in the bud – in schools.

One of the hottest shows on Food Network Canada recently was Jamie’s School Dinners, in which Jamie Oliver attempts to wean English schoolchildren off Wimpy’s burgers and french fries and introduce them to the pleasures of the, um, green bean. Singapore led the fight on fat in schools, launching its “Trim and Fit” program in 1992. The program makes chubby kids join school weight-loss clubs until they lose the mandated extra pounds. They’re given “calorie-cash,” tradable only for low-cal snacks. The thin kids, meanwhile, get to wear “I’m trim and fit” wristbands and eat whatever they want. Last year, Quebec’s Education Minister Pierre Reid added a distinctly Quebecois voice to the chorus, proposing a poutine policy banning the stuff from school cafeterias.