Intermittent fasting while commuting

Cases have been made for quite a while to ban eating on public transportation — buses and underground trains — for reasons ranging from safety (passengers can slip on fallen food) and health (rats flourish on carelessly disposed scraps) to cost (labour has to be hired to clean).

But Britain’s about-toretire chief medical officer has come up with what is surely the best reason yet to proscribe snacking while commuting: to combat obesity. She avers — unlike the now-trimmer British Prime Minister Boris Johnson — that excess weight is the result of too much nibbling on the trot, not too little exercise.

And putting her weight behind a no-food-on-the-move rule, calorie caps on all meals from restaurants and takeaways, ‘cigarette-style’ uninviting packaging for chocolates and other sugary treats and banning junk food advertising in public spaces is only to be expected from an official who has designated herself as ‘nanny in chief ’.


Health policy framers could, of course, promote her prescription as another variant of the dieting trend called ‘intermittent fasting’, given that transport networks in several cities around the world do not allow consumption of food or beverages on board anyway and passengers have lived to tell the tale. Whether this abstinence has helped commuters lose or maintain weight, however, remains to be verified.