Call me a curmudgeon, but I have never been able to fathom the baking craze. Not that I don't hold in high esteem the skill and talent required. But behind this refined, sugary, lardy, high-carb cooking spree that has become our national obsession, all these floury delights and their cheap mass production imitations are making everyone bigger.
According to NHS statistics, less than 40% of all men and women in the UK are a healthy weight. Cupcake culture, once middle class mumsy, now mainstream greedy, is dangerous and causing a serious epidemic. And we are all dancing in the dark, obsessing about who is going to win the latest Great British Bake Off.
Apparently one of the most common challenges for people who become morbidly obese is a fear of cooking. They feel they have forgotten skills they might have once had, or feel excluded by what they perceive to be a special skill. This, in turn, results in a reliance on processed foods, which then leads to a dependence on highly refined sugars and salts.
Okay, people make their choices and I love good bread but if all you see is cakes and pies everywhere, who's going to stop you? Move over MDMA, these days serotonin levels everywhere are peaking on the shortcrust rush of insulin as starch converts to sugar and stores itself in our welcoming fat cells. But on the telly, all the pushers are thin and gorgeous. Funny that. You've got to love the elegant Mary Berry, but she doesn't look as though she's eaten a cake in quite a long time.
TV cooking programming has all but thrown aside any nod to healthy eating since the ill-fated "Doctor" Gillian McKeith was thrown to the wolves. In fact the message she was giving, albeit a little obsessed by poo, is right. You are - or will become - exactly what what you eat. If you spend a lot of time cooking cakes, bread, pies and sticky chocolate sticks, and then eating them, you'll end up like the back end of a bus with any number of potential reasons to suffer complete engine breakdown.
Fine for those who have the time, money and energy to go off to the gym or military boot camp after filming. But the country is stacked high with people who can only just make it to the cake tin and back. And it's just a bit dangerous that we are not doing anything to encourage them to eat responsibly.