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The Times – Kate Moss: an icon of willpower and strength<br/> Don’t damn the supermodel for being honest. If you want to be thin, you have to eat less. And thin is much better than fat, by Giles Coren (the food critic)

Asked during an interview with a fashion website if she had any mottoes, Kate Moss replied, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”. And the clouds parted, and the sky opened, and Hell rained down upon her.

“Outrage over Kate’s size zero motto” screamed one newspaper. “Storm at ‘anorexia’ comments”, cried another, putting ‘anorexia’ in inverted commas, of course, because Kate didn’t say anything about anorexia at all.

Most of the time the tabloids lambast Kate for the twin evils of endorsing drug abuse and taking pleasure from sexual intercourse, but this time they were furious because, by apparently celebrating a lifestyle choice that involves exercising willpower in the face of temptation in order to feel good about herself, Kate is, of course, encouraging teenage girls to develop a mental illness and die.

It’s so stupid and hysterical and infuriating I don’t know where to start.

Hah. (Emphasis mine.)

The wider application of Kate’s consequence-aware behavioural code might see impressionable young people being told, “No drunken night out with the girls is as fun as not being raped by an unlicensed minicab driver and left for dead in a grimy back street”; or “no summer of bunking off and smoking joints in the park when you should be revising for your GCSEs is as much fun as a life spent not being a dustman”. The message that every action in life has a consequence is a glorious and honourable one to propound.

Apart from anything else, what we have in the developed world is an obesity crisis, not an anorexia crisis. Sure, it is sad that a handful of young women harm themselves every year in the pursuit of the size-zero mirage, but it is nothing compared with the 100,000 Britons who die every year from diseases related to obesity. If Kate’s bon mots are really so influential that they will stop people eating, reverse the obesity tide (especially in children), save the £4 billion a year lost to the national purse as a consequence of mass fatness and bring our life expectancy averages back on track then, frankly, a few emaciated teenagers is a small price to pay.

Anyway, you live longer if you’re overly thin than if you’re overly fat. And no, that doesn’t mean dangerously, anorexically thin, which is a flipping mental illness and not something one’s going to “catch” from a supermodel’s comment in Women’s Wear Daily.