JAPAN:ONCE THE butt of jokes, the sight of men sucking in their bellies to hide expanding waistlines just got a lot more serious in Japan, where the government has introduced mandatory "fat checks" for the over-40s.
Aimed at trimming bulging annual health costs of over $3 billion, the health ministry says from next month about 56 million people must start keeping waistlines tucked in or be asked to change diet, see a doctor and possibly pay higher insurance costs.
The plan for the potbelly police, however, which sets a waist limit of 85cm (33½in) for men and 90cm (35½in) for women, has come under fire from critics who say it will do more harm than good.
"It's a comedy," Professor Yoichi Ogushi told the Japan Times. "If you follow the government's logic, you can do whatever you want as long as you have a slim waist."
Although mostly spared the obesity epidemic that plagues many Western nations, Japan is struggling with a recent rise in lifestyle illnesses, especially among the middle-aged.
The health ministry says 27 million people either suffer from or at risk of high blood pressure, blood sugars and cholesterol, collectively known as metabolic syndrome, or "metabo" in the popular media.
Fear of the condition, and its associated diseases of strokes, heart attacks and diabetes, is behind a wave of new health fads and crash diets. With half of all men aged 40-74 sufferers, one estimate is that the market for "anti-metabo" services, such as private health guidance and fat farms, could soon reach 100 billion yen.
The fight-the-flap campaign has already claimed at least one victim. Last year a 74-year-old local government official in the rural Mie prefecture collapsed while jogging in an effort to cut his 100cm (39in) waist.
He was a member of the government's weight-loss programme.
But the government rejects charges of scare mongering. "We have to bring medical costs down," said Toshiyuki Sato, a spokesman for the ministry of health, who denied the plan will encourage crash-dieting and pill-popping. "Dieting badly will eventually cause medical costs to rise even more, so we hope that the metabolic tests will be properly supervised." The plan calls for a 25 per cent cut in the "metabo" ranks by 2011, despite criticism that the waist-size limit is arbitrary and will encourage size-ism in the workplace.
"Fat people will be criticised by skinny people, old people by the young and companies will refuse to hire overweight people," said Katsura Sigiura (37), a Tokyo construction engineer who says he is "borderline" tubby.
"It makes me angry that the government has started this without consulting us."