Greed was good - now it's time to go on a diet

WITH ALL this talk of belt-tightening one has to wonder how many people actually have a waist anymore, writes Orna Mulcahy 

As it happens, big belts are back in fashion and they look fabulous on reedy young women with perfect waist-to-hip ratios, but the rest of us need to look out. With almost a quarter of the population now considered obese and diabetes a looming menace, the country could do with slimming down.

Now, fresh evidence from a Europe-wide study of over 350,000 people shows that a large waistline doubles ones chances of early death. What's a large waistline? Thirty-nine inches for women. A small waist is 26 inches, says the study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. Not so long ago the perfect hourglass figure for a woman was considered to be 34-24-34, but you don't see too many of them nowadays, except maybe among 12-year-olds.

So, let's not comfort eat our way out of this recession. In Dundrum shopping centre earlier this week to do some early Christmas shopping I got waylaid by a slice of lemon cake in Butlers cafe. I felt perversely entitled to it, having just spent an hour at the dentist who is doing his best to rescue my fangs from a lifetime of sweet eating.

Butlers was packed. All around folks were tucking into bowls of milky coffee and wedges of cake as though life depended on it. Hefty women oozing fat around the middle - where it's at its most dangerous - were busy demolishing gateaux and croissants at 4.30 in the afternoon. Meanwhile, Starbucks was full of hair-flicking 15-year-olds queuing up to buy 500-calorie frappuccinos and more. Do they realise that a raspberry chocolate-chip muffin cannot be counted as one of the five-a-day fruit and veg options? Even the blueberry version loses it super-food status when it is drowned in the horrible amount of oil used to make a muffin.

Elsewhere in the centre, the sushi bar was fairly quiet though there were crowds at Bramleys, a place selling huge slabs of quiche and baked potatoes the size of a child's head. The shops meanwhile were almost empty. Was everyone there just to eat? Dundrum is just about to sign up its 30th food tenant, Roly's Bistro, and the others are trading well, say owners Chartered Land, from the ice cream stand right up to the fabulous foodiefest that is the fifth floor at Harvey Nichols. The appeal is such that shopping centre owners throughout the UK have been visiting to take notes. The food , they think, is the key to attracting shoppers. Whatever about holding back on the big spend, it seems we're not going to take off the nose bag just yet. It's a lesson learned from the Americans where malls are places you can spend all day in, packing in a week's worth of calories, though in Dundrum the secret has been in attracting high-end restaurants as well as fast-food chains.

Following suit, London's latest shopping centre, the Westfield at Shepherds Bush, has no less than 50 food outlets.

Last summer's dreadful weather sent parents rushing to shopping centres like the Bridgewater in Arklow which has a winning combination of fast food and cinema. Here the Brittas Bay brigade fed their children like harvest frogs at Eddie Rockets, and then treated them to buckets of popcorn and Cokes at the movies.

All the signs are that we've gorged our way through the boom, buying and eating much more than we need, stocking up on three-for-two offers, allowing our children to get hooked on convenience food filled with fat, trans fats, salt and sugar. Where once a choc ice would have been a treat, now only a Magnum will do, and they don't have to walk to the shop to buy it either, since we have the freezer stocked to the brim with lollies.

If economic circumstances are forcing us back into the 1980s, then let's turn the clock back on our eating patterns too. Watching a re-run of the quintessential 1980s cop show Cagney & Lacey recently, it was mesmerizing to see the detectives share a takeout lunch - tiny packets that turned out to be burgers and drinks in small Styrofoam cups. No wonder they all had snake hips.

Around the same time as Cagney & Lacey got going, the first shopping centre cafe to really make an impact in Dublin opened for business. It was the Mary Rose cafe in the Powerscourt Townhouse Centre behind Grafton Street. People came from miles around to treat themselves to what at the time seemed to be absolutely vast slices of gateau and pavlova. Their flapjacks were the size of dinner plates. There were queues from early morning until later afternoon but that is because there was nowhere else like it. You didn't meet those cakes in the supermarket, or in every street corner cafe as you do now, in between shoe-sized paninis and breakfast rolls that could feed an entire family.

It's fair to say we've had our cake and eaten it. Now it's time to say no, and find our waists again.