A DONER kebab “contains as much fat as a wine glass full of cooking oil”.

The summer barbecue season is upon us and the Mail has the perfect menus to make a sunny afternoon go with a swing.

Careful with those matches, mum and dad, one stray spark and your evening livener burns brighter than your skin in the summer sun.

Safety first, says the Mail, which has popped out for a takeaway, and returned with a kebab, curry and Cornish pasty and chips, possibly all on one cone.

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THE Mail searches, scouring medical reports and research notes for news, and finally its quest bears dividends: “Baby–bottle chemicals ‘could make children obese for life’.”

Exposure to “gender-bending” chemicals widely used in household products could “alter the genes and hormones involved in maintaining a healthy weight.”

So scientists say…

HAVING run out of people to DNA test the Government is keeping its hand in by sampling our meat.

The BBC tested the meat at 40 pubs and discovered that 20 per cent of samples labelled “local” beef in south-west England were foreign. Furthermore, one plate of mince and carrots was responsible for the Omagh bomb and a wastrel of a sausage fathered a child called Armani (those finding are with the CSA right now).

The Food Standards Agency said it was disappointed by the findings and called for labelling laws to be clarified.

Scientists at Dublin-based DNA specialists Identigen found that eight of the samples had the DNA of the humped zebu cattle.

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IN “Sorry wrong house,” the Mail looks on as masked police officers smash their way into a terraced home in Greater Manchester.

“Sorry love, wrong house,” says the lead officer as the coppers are confronted by school dinner lady Kathleen Oldham sitting in her dressing grown supping a cup of tea.

The police say they are after drugs dealers believed to be operating in a nearby address.

But are they? Note once more that Mrs Oldham makes school dinners for the young. And then see the police board up her windows, so removing her from society, and present her with a bouquet of flowers, ostensibly by way of an apology.

But look again at the flowers. See the bug. Hear it fizz and buzz like a police radio.

Feel the tension as Mrs Oldham goes to her freezer. Will she go for the fresh frozen pas and keep her doors on their hinges, or will she retrieve the chicken nuggets and hear the shout “Go! Go! Go!”

The war on school dinners is upon us. The gloves are off…

THEY’VE never had it so good in Portsmouth, where one quarter of the locals are seriously overweight.

Londoners forced to subsist on skinny coffees and lo-cal yoghurt can look on with unbridled envy.

But news is that the Pompey Pokers are not overweight enough.

Should they require an operation to stop them from eating too much – thus sparing some food for the town’s other three-quarters who want to bulk up - the Pompey Pokers need to boast a body mass index of 60.

Government guidelines are to operate when the porker achieves a BMI of 40, but so fat are they in Pompey that 60 is the new 40.

Says Dr Sally Nelson, medical advisor for NHS South Central: “We are seeing a level of demand beyond what we estimated. Our surgeons simply do not have the capacity to operate on every morbidly obsese person.”

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“CAN VITAMINS DO YOU HARM,” asks the Mail on its front page.

After reading the piece we conclude: “Do they?”

But the final works must be with the Mail, which brings readers this scoop: “Could vitamin pills shorten your life?”

“ADDITIVES DO HARM CHILDREN,” says the Mail’s front-page headline.

Anorak looks at the page and sees a picture of Abu Qatada, “Bin Laden’s man in Britain”. He’s in a high-security British jail.

He can’t be deported to his native Jordan in case he gets bullied/ tortured/laughed at.

Sending Abu Qatada back would impact upon his human rights. We are an understanding and tolerant nation. We should be proud.

Indeed, looking at Abu Qatada, who weighs 20 stone, and reading that aforesaid headline on additives, one wonders if he is not the product of a poor childhood diet?

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IT’S Nigella Lawson on the Daily Express’s cover page.

“So has TV’s yummy cook out a bit too much in her tummy?” asks the paper. The Mail looks at her “jumbo knees”.

Readers may well expect this question to appear alongside a shot of the celebrity throwing up in a taxi. But Nigella is above such things – she most likely has a driver - and can be seen dressed in a vomit-free black top and pink cardigan.

The question, of course, is: “Is Nigella getting fatter?” And if she isn’t, why isn’t she?
Because today the Express screams: “TUCK IN AND LOOSEN YOUR BELTS, IT’S FAT WEDNESDAY.”

The paper says that “we’re likely to cram more food into our tummies today than on any other day, bar Christmas”.

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HOW fat are we? The Mail says schools are buying reinforced chairs and tables to cope with oversize pupils.

The Mail focuses on the fatness, almost overlooking the height.

Levent Caglar, of the Furniture Industry Research Association, says: “My study showed that children have been growing since 1971. In that time, they have grown another three centimetres, just over an inch, or one centimetre every decade.”

But the Mail’s story is all about weight. And though the extra leg may account for the extra pounds, the Mail looks at children’s “inactive lifestyles and hours spent slumped in front of the computer and TV”.

Of course, if the children were not given bigger furniture but instead issued with lighter chairs and desks, they could be shamed into stopping growing by sensing the chair and table splinter and crack under their massive bulk.

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JUST when you thought school could not get any worse, the Mirror announces: “FREE SCHOOL MEAL FOR EVERY PUPIL.”

Says Labour MP Sharon Hodgson said: “This is just the type of big bold thinking we need to secure a fourth term. In many schools, children roam the streets at lunchtimes, which is often bad news for local residents and good news for the chippy or burger bars.”

Vote Labour and say “No” to lunchtime trade. That’s the small business vote secured.

Ms Hodgson goes on: “It’s just over a century since the School Meals Act in 1906, which aimed to ensure children were not too hungry to concentrate.”

It’s 1906 and all that. No central heating in those halcyon days of rumbaba and rickets. Turn off the generator. Make it cold and so improve the students’ powers of concentration

“We now need to ensure that not only does no child go hungry but their food is healthy. All children get a desk, pencils and pens and a teacher. They should also get lunch, it’s as fundamental as that.”

What about desks sprayed with a Vitamin Varnish, quills plucked from organic hens, pencils fashioned from carrot sticks and a teacher who brings in an apple a day for her class?

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“HOW YOU CAN LOOK TEN YEARS YOUNGER WITH ROSEMARY CONLEY,” says the Sunday Express.

No, not by standing alongside Ms Conley and so looking fitter and younger. Conley is a health and weight guru.

It’s by watching what you eat and exercising. And by taking vitamins, which the Sunday Express also advertises on its front page.

But if you really want to look young, why not wear a hood and look ten, 20, 30 years younger.

If you can equip your youthful look with a refer, a bottle of alcopops and someone else’s wallet, then so much the younger… 

STOP smoking and get fat. We all knew it. And they’re learning about it in New York:

New York City residents are growing obese at a rate nearly three times that of other Americans, prompting some who cited a link between weight gain and smoking cessation to question whether the city’s crackdown on smoking may have had an unexpected result.

In a new study, city health officials found that obesity and diabetes rates here increased 17% between 2002 and 2004. By contrast, there was a 6% increase in national obesity rates during that time, and no significant increase in the rate of diabetes. City residents also gained 10 million pounds collectively during the two-year period, researchers found. The findings were reported in the April issue of the journal Preventing Chronic Disease.

Smoking meat makes it last longer - it preseves…

IT’S a too Small World for fat Americans visiting Disneyland. Anorak’s man in Los Angeles, Taboid Baby, takes a look:

Disneyland’s “It’s A Small World” attraction, which features animatronic children singing the maddening song about global peace, has been closed for months in order to retrofit the boats that carry patrons though the venerable ride to accommodate the wide fat asses of modern Americans (people were less weighty when the ride was launched at the NYC World’s Fair in 1964). But now it’s been revealed that the inheritors of Walt Disney’s dream have hatched an evil plan to add cartoon characters throughout the ride and to replace the Rain Forest section with a tribute called “Up with America”!

The situation is serious enough that the family of the ride’s creator has stepped forward in an effort to stop the madness:
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IT takes four hours to lower the body of Christian Jeffrey into the ground.

The Mail says a solitary “good Samaritan” attended the 29-year-old’s council-paid funeral service.

Jeffrey is not the last but one man on Earth. Jeffrey is – was – 52-stone.

Gravediggers spent five days preparing the 4ft 8ins x 7ft 8ins hole for Mr Jeffrey and a 4ft x 7ft coffin, made of a reinforced MDF.

Dave Butler, cemetery groundsman, tells us: “There have been six of us working on the site and all our backs are aching. It’s been the biggest job I’ve been involved in by a long way. It usually takes us two days at most to prepare graves - and that’s when they’ve been dug by hand. This one has taken us five days and we had the use of a digger. It has been a real team effort.”

Sad times. RIP, Mr Jeffrey. But we cannot help that this was an opportunity missed.

In the drooling maw of what we are told is an obesity crisis, surely some oversight that Sarah Ferguson was not invited to attend, and the ceremony not forming the central plank is an Trevor McDonald TV special.

Mr Jeffrey should not have been lowered into a readymade pit but used as part of a scientific experiment to see if the fat really are digging their own graves. Look on as Mr Jeffrey is raised to great height by the Great BRtian Tug-o-War team and then let go.

Can he make it to six feet under, even after heavy rain?

FIRST Nicolas Sarkozy wants French food to be listed by Unesco as part of the world’s heritage, and now the Italians want their Mediterranean diet to be likewise acknowledged:
As The Croydonian says: I am NOT making this up:

“Italy is to spearhead an international campaign to win UNESCO recognition for the Mediterranean diet, Italian Agriculture Minister Paolo De Castro announced on Tuesday. The minister told delegates that Italy [would ask UNESCO] to add the diet to its World Heritage List“…

It turns out that this is an extension of existing UNESCO nonsense, as “It has opened its register to include ”intangible heritage”, such as endangered languages or vanishing traditions. The Mediterranean diet is aiming for inclusion in this new category, which is so far home to music, dance and oral traditions from around the world“.

A bit of rooting around has found a list of what UNESCO reckons to be ‘Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity‘, and doubtless every Belgian would immediately have thought of Processional Giants and Dragons, Italians of Opera dei Pupi, and Czechs of Slovácko Verbuňk or Recruit Dances. Incest and folk dancing, eh?

If everything in our culture is so valuable, why is our Government trying so hard to cut down on binge drinking, football hooliganism and joyriding? And what can UNESCO do to keep our culture alive?

“WHY are children so unhappy?” asks the Independent on its front page.

The motion at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers annual conference in Torquay next Tuesday runs: “Conference notes with deep concern that many children in our schools appear unhappy and anxious.”

The adults will debate and discuss why children are so unhappy.

Over the next two weeks, ATL members will discuss several topics relating to the mental health of primary age children and the pressures they face in modern society.

Teachers discussing what makes a young child unhappy is a bit like the jockey asking the horse why his face is long. It might be that – and whisper it – school is the biggest problem. It is school that ruins the child’s pursuit of fun.

Question asked; question answered.

It may also be that the teacher’s idea of happiness is not the pupil’s.

Armani is happy eating chips for breakfast, her teacher is not; Blake’s face lights up whenever he delivers a punch to a smaller child’s arm, his teacher’s does not; Romeo is never happier than when he is picking his nose and firing the oar at the girls, his teacher is not.

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