Fat Brits, like everything else that the world is supposed to regret, are, it seems, America’s fault, well sort of anyway. This piece from the London Independent is also noteworthy for the following statistics:

“Research in the US has shown that in the past 20 years the size of a standard hamburger has increased by 112 per cent and bagels by 195 per cent. Pasta servings are 480 per cent bigger and cookies 700 per cent larger.”

The key, I suppose, is in the word ’serving’, but, even allowing for that, the figure for cookies seems unbelievable. A cookie a seventh of the size of the typical offering we see today wouldn’t be a cookie, it would be a crumb.