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Is the rising tide of obesity a real cause for concern, or just a vehicle for media worriers?

Hello, to the fat of the land. And, according to research published last week, that includes an awful lot of people - in more ways than one. A fifth of adults and around 11 per cent of children in the UK are clinically obese, putting us at the top of the European calorie overload league. Welcome too, to 25 per cent of the female population, who allegedly worry as much about what they swallow as the state of their relationships (the two, of course, are as closely linked as Delia and the perfectly boiled egg).

It wouldn't be January if we weren't asked to digest a bumper crop of statistics about our size and shape. So, last week saw a double launch. First, was the arrival of Weight Concern, a charity, which, according to the co-founder psychologist Jane Wardle, hopes to challenge rising "anti-fat prejudice" since the tripling of obesity since 1980 and news that obesity costs the National Health Service £500m annually.

Weight Concern's debut was followed by the publication of What's Eating Us?, a book written by Susie Orbach, author 23 years ago of Fat Is A Feminist Issue. Now, she warns, "We are facing a public health emergency in which it is the norm to accept being messed up around food and eating"

She illustrates the nature of our "dangerous obsession" with various surveys. For instance, two-thirds of young women say they are unhappy with their bodies; 48 per cent of women aged 25-35 are on some kind of diet and 1-2 per cent of young adult women are anorexic or bulimic (and both problems are among males too).

What these statistics express to me, however, is less evidence of a public health emergency and more the urgent need for a lot more lateral thinking in all areas of social policy. On the issue of eating disorders, for instance, the small and unnoticed miracle is not the numbers of young girls who succumb to anorexia - but the very many who don't in spite of the seductions of fashion and diet. Likewise, 50 per cent of young women are, apparently, sane and stable about the role of food in their lives.

Policy makers, traditionally accustomed to charting what goes wrong might begin to turn more of their attention to the lessons learned from what goes right, often against the odds, in ostensibly difficult lives.

How does one emotionally confused teenager nevertheless resist succumbing to food mania? What gift does the impoverished single parent have who rears two children to magnificent maturity? What might be the attributes of the step-families who bond well? The questions have been asked before - but the appetite for answers has barely even begun to be appeased.