Commentary There is another pandemic that, in the long run, may be more harmful to the health of humanity than that of COVID-19. It will ultimately cause the loss of many more years of human life, if it does not already do so. Whether pandemic is quite the right word for it might be disputed. I am referring to the vast increase in obesity in most parts of the world in recent decades. The word pandemic suggests illness, but is obesity in itself an illness? That it causes illness, no one will dispute: but many things cause illnesses without being themselves illnesses. Increasingly, however, medical journals write of obesity, as they do of addiction, as if it were in the same category as, say, multiple sclerosis or Parkinson’s disease, that is to say an unfortunate mischance. There is now, after all, surgery for obesity which works; drug companies research drugs …