DR Simon Eccles, chairman of a British Medical Association committee, frightens me when he says: "There is an increasing fear that medical training is being dumbed-down."

It has come to something when doctors themselves admit that patients' lives are being put at risk because some doctors are being allowed to skip advanced training altogether. How interesting that it should be the prestigious BMA itself which is warning of this disturbing development.

For here is another quotation from a senior member of that same prestigious association of doctors, no less than Peter Tiplady, chairman of the BMA's public health committee: he says that in order to tackle obesity, the Government should "improve access to exercise and healthy food".

Whenever you hear an expression such as "improve access", you know that you have entered a dumbed-down, bureaucratic world already - whatever the speaker might go on to say. "Improve access" is a phrase that can mean something only in a situation where there exists a huge, forbidding barrier. For example, you might want to campaign for improved access to the Post Office counter by the removal of the Stalinist oppression which dictates that only two out of the ten cashiers' windows are ever open. But improve access to exercise? Where's the barrier, then? What's stopping anyone from exercising, anywhere, ever?

I confess, I am a part-time exercise freak. I need to be to work off all these City dinners. But how do I manage to work out every day when no one has provided me with "access" to exercise? I do something that requires an enormous amount of intelligence and expertise. I walk up the bedroom stairs - yes, putting one foot in front of the other. And then I walk up them a further hundred times.

Now I will grant Peter Tiplady and the rest of the army of social engineers that there may be a handful of "deprived" and "underprivileged" people who are not fortunate enough to have any bedroom stairs of their own and so sadly lack "access" to this sort of exercise.

So let me enquire further: do these impoverished fatsos without bedroom stairs have streets outside their houses? Let me ask the even more delicate question: are these folk so dumbed-down already that they don't know how to open the door, go out into the street and walk or, heaven help us, even run? Let us suppose that, even after all the benefits of modern education, there are people who are indeed so stupid. Then may I suggest that these people stand where they are standing and start to bend the knees and stretch their arms?

What Peter Tiplady of the BMA says is twaddle. How can it be that fatsos who have access to computer games and crisps and Internet chat rooms and wall to wall idiot telly don't have enough access to their own bodies even to run about a bit?

His claim that "underprivileged" chubbies don't have access to what he calls "healthy food" is equally barmy. Obviously, these chubbies already have access to plenty of "unhealthy food". OK - just eat less of it. Or is that rocket science?

The message put out by the social engineers that healthy food is expensive is a lie. Potatoes (boiled or roasted); bread (not caked with butter); tins of tomatoes (for as little as 16p a time); swede; onions (add hot water and you've got soup); cabbage; give up the sweetened drinks and take to tea; buy a large chicken for £3 and make many meals out of it; try liver and kidney, etc.

The fight is not against deprivation but against ignorance and - this goes especially for "health experts" - stupidity and political obsession.