Satireday on Eco-Crap

Satireday on Eco-Crap

Make you Fink on Friday

Does this make you think?

Why does America have a greater obesity problem than Europe…

 

Satireday on Eco-Crap

Make you Fink on Friday

As a parent there is one battle you’ll never win.

Eat your veges!

I had a pet hate when I was a kid, eat a bean, not on your life, but I loved peas. My brother was the opposite; he’d eat beans, but touch a pea, not until Hell froze over.

But now I eat beans, in fact, I had French beans just last night. I don’t know about my brother, if he now eats peas or not.

But for my mother it was pure torment.

Here’s an interesting article:

Don’t make children eat their greens

It’s the age-old family dilemma. And guess what, parents? It isn’t worth the bother

Tim and Ruby Lott. Photograph: Pål Hansen for Observer Food Monthly

One day, when my daughter, Ruby, was about 10 years old, I had a colossal argument with her about a pea. We were in Ikea in Brent Cross, north London. We had ordered lunch in the Ikea restaurant. It involved something and peas.

I had struggled to get Ruby to “eat normally” for as long as I could remember. She refused a wide variety of foods – most fruits, and most particularly any kind of green vegetable. On this day, I’d just had enough.

I was determined to make Ruby eat just one pea. Just one. It could be smothered in tomato ketchup. It could be dipped in honey. I just wanted her to eat… the… fucking… pea.

We spent half an hour discussing, arguing about and reasoning over that pea. I offered an absurd array of rewards. I don’t remember what they were, but they were princely. Whatever she wanted she could have. If she would just eat that pea. Then I began to threaten punishments. She could see she had made me angry, and it was obvious I was going to get even angrier if she didn’t Eat the Pea.

But she still wouldn’t eat the pea. And she hasn’t eaten one since.

After the Battle of the Pea, I reached a watershed. I became a lot less fussed about what Ruby ate. I don’t know if it made any difference. I don’t recall any marked immediate improvement in her eating behaviour. But I suspect that my defeat was a good thing.

Now she is 20, she has a very healthy attitude to food. She doesn’t worry about it. She loves steak tartare. She craves sushi and sashimi, she eats fruit, she’ll try most things. She has no body issues and no food issues that I can see. She has glowing skin and hair, and is a healthy weight.

She still doesn’t eat peas. Or any other kind of green vegetable, including salad. Her explanation is straightforward: “They don’t taste good.”

They don’t. But then, why do we spend so much time trying to get our children to eat them? And is it really, in the end, worth the candle?

My suspicion is that all the effort, care and concern that many families expend to get their children to “eat healthy”, may have no effect, or a bad effect. We worry too much, and this worry has as much to do with social shame, social display and a need for control as it does with healthy eating.

We don’t want our children to end up living on convenience foods, snacks and chips – partly because it is bad for them, but more pressingly, because it is bad for us. Because it is embarrassing.

Around the time of the Pea Incident, I had taken Ruby and her sister Cissy to a fancy French hotel in Mauritius. One night a week, they offered an amazing buffet. I sent the girls off to graze among the 50 or so amazingly varied and delicious platters of French and Asian food and charcuterie.

They came back with chips, white bread and a bit of chicken. That time I wasn’t even furious. I was just ashamed. What was wrong with these kids that amid all this wonderful plenty, they opted for the crappiest dishes on the menu? I just thought they must be horribly spoilt.

Ruby aged 7 and Cissy Lott aged 5. Photograph: Tim Lott

Perhaps this was unfair of me. But I do think many parents would feel the same. Yet it was just a meal. Why was I so upset? Perhaps the need for our children to eat healthy food is just a mask for a number of other anxieties. We want to fit in with our neighbours. We want to be able to make the correct social signals to our peer group – “I am a good middle-class person, because my children eat a varied diet and healthy food”. We are terrified our children might be overweight, which is now as much a social marker as a predictor of poor health.

Nutritional science, however, is inexact. Why did Ruby grow up with clear skin, shining hair and a healthy attitude to food despite eating very little fruit and no green vegetables and a relatively limited diet through most of her childhood?

The human body is more complex and adaptable than we realise. The Kitava tribe of Papua New Guinea subsist on a diet that mainly consists of sweet potato, coconut and some fish. They are healthy, have good skin, strong teeth and suffer from virtually none of all the “diseases of civilisation”. They don’t eat any green vegetables.

Greens are not a must-have. Nutrients found in green vegetables can easily be found elsewhere. “The human body is very clever and can adapt over generations. It can use what resources it has available,” says Charlotte Stirling-Reed of the Nutrition Society, an independent organisation that promotes and disseminates nutritional science. “If you still eat a wide variety of different foods you will get those nutrients elsewhere.

“Most of the vitamins and nutrients in green vegetables can easily be found from other sources – in meat and fish and lentils and beans, in other fruit and vegetables. As long as you are getting variety and the right amount of food every day you will be OK.

“Everybody is individual and very different. If Ruby is eating well, every day, mainly healthy foods, she will be thriving. The anxieties and concerns and worries of the parents can rub off on their children and cause fussy eating. That’s very common.”

The psychotherapist Susie Orbach, author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue, makes a similar point about adults getting over-anxious about food and sees parental anxiety as a major contributor to disordered eating. I told her that I used to get particularly upset if I spent a lot of time and effort preparing my children’s food and they rejected it.

She sees such anxiety as centring on issues of control and rejection of the offerer of the food rather than the food itself. In other words, you’re not getting upset when your child won’t eat because it’s not healthy. It’s because you perceive the child as rejecting your love. And the whole framing of the issue around health and nutrition – food as “medicine” – is misguided.

Read more

Yes, it’s a dilemma faced by all parents. But don’t stop here, read more of this fascinating story

Make you Fink on Friday

Fat profits: how the food industry cashed in on obesity

Ever since definitions of healthy bodyweight changed in the 1990s, the world has feared an obesity epidemic. But the food giants accused of making us fat are also profiting from the slimming industry

Weight-loss has become a huge global industry

When you walk into a supermarket, what do you see? Walls of highly calorific, intensely processed food, tweaked by chemicals for maximum “mouth feel” and “repeat appeal” (addictiveness). This is what most people in Britain actually eat. Pure science on a plate. The food, in short, that is making the planet fat.

And next to this? Row upon row of low-fat, light, lean, diet, zero, low-carb, low-cal, sugar-free, “healthy” options, marketed to the very people made fat by the previous aisle and now desperate to lose weight. We think of obesity and dieting as polar opposites, but in fact, there is a deep, symbiotic relationship between the two.

In the UK, 60% of us are overweight, yet the “fat” (and I include myself in this category, with a BMI of 27, slap-bang average for the overweight British male) are not lazy and complacent about our condition, but ashamed and desperate to do something about it. Many of those classed as “overweight” are on a near-perpetual diet, and the same even goes for half of the British population, many of whom don’t even need to lose an ounce.

When obesity as a global health issue first came on the radar, the food industry sat up and took notice. But not exactly in the way you might imagine. Some of the world’s food giants opted to do something both extraordinary and stunningly obvious: they decided to make money from obesity, by buying into the diet industry.

Weight Watchers, created by New York housewife Jean Nidetch in the early 1960s, was bought by Heinz in 1978, who in turn sold the company in 1999 to investment firm Artal for $735m. The next in line was Slimfast, a liquid meal replacement invented by chemist and entrepreneur Danny Abraham, which was bought in 2000 by Unilever, which also owns the Ben & Jerry brand and Wall’s sausages. The US diet phenomenon Jenny Craig was bought by Swiss multinational Nestlé, which also sells chocolate and ice-cream. In 2011, Nestlé was listed in Fortune’s Global 500 as the world’s most profitable company.

These multinationals were easing carefully into a multibillion pound weight-loss market encompassing gyms, home fitness, fad diets and crash diets, and the kind of magazines that feature celebs on yo-yo diets or pushing fitness DVDs promising an “all new you” in just three weeks.

You would think there might be a problem here: the food industry has one ostensible objective – and that’s to sell food. But by creating the ultimate oxymoron of diet food – something you eat to lose weight – it squared a seemingly impossible circle. And we bought it. Highly processed diet meals emerged, often with more sugar in them than the originals, but marketed for weight loss, and here is the key get-out clause, “as part of a calorie-controlled diet”. You can even buy a diet Black Forest gateau if want.

We think of obesity and dieting as polar opposites, but there is a deep relationship between the two

We think of obesity and dieting as polar opposities, but there is a deep relationship between the two

So what you see when you walk into a supermarket in 2013 is the entire 360 degrees of obesity in a single glance. The whole panorama of fattening you up and slimming you down, owned by conglomerates which have analysed every angle and money-making opportunity. The very food companies charged with making us fat in the first place are now also making money from the obesity epidemic.

How did this happen? Let me sketch two alternative scenarios. This is the first: in the late 1970s, food companies made tasty new food. People started to get fat. By the 1990s, NHS costs related to obesity were ballooning. Government, health experts and, surprisingly, the food industry were brought in to consult on what was to be done. They agreed that the blame lay with the consumer – fat people needed to go on diets and exercise. The plan didn’t work. In the 21st century, people are getting fatter than ever.

OK, here’s scenario two. Food companies made tasty new food. People started to get fat. By the 1990s, food companies and, more to the point, the pharmaceutical industry, looked at the escalating obesity crisis, and realised there was a huge amount of money to be made.

But, seen purely in terms of profit, the biggest market wasn’t just the clinically obese (those people with a BMI of 30-plus), whose condition creates genuine health concerns, but the billions of ordinary people worldwide who are just a little overweight, and do not consider their weight to be a significant health problem.

That was all about to change. A key turning point was 3 June 1997. On this date the World Health Organisation (WHO) convened an expert consultation in Geneva that formed the basis for a report that defined obesity not merely as a coming social catastrophe, but as an “epidemic”.

The word “epidemic” is crucial when it comes to making money out of obesity, because once it is an epidemic, it is a medical catastrophe. And if it is medical, someone can supply a “cure”.

The author of the report was one of the world’s leading obesity experts, Professor Philip James, who, having started out as a doctor, had been one of the first to spot obesity rising in his patients in the mid-1970s. In 1995 he set up a body called the International Obesity Task Force (IOTF), which reported on rising obesity levels across the globe and on health policy proposals for how the problem could be addressed.

It is widely accepted that James put fat on the map, and thus it was appropriate that the IOTF should draft the WHO report of the late 90s that would define global obesity. The report painted an apocalyptic picture of obesity going off the scale across the globe.

The devil was in the detail – and the detail lay in where you drew the line between “normal” and “overweight”. Several colleagues questioned the group’s decision to lower the cut-off point for being “overweight” – from a BMI of 27 to 25. Overnight, millions of people around the globe would shift from the “normal” to the “overweight” category.

Professor Judith Stern, vice president of the American Obesity Association, was critical, and suspicious. “There are certain risks associated with being obese … but in the 25-to-27 area it’s low-risk. When you get over 27 the risk becomes higher. So why would you take a whole category and make this category related to risk when it isn’t?”

Why indeed. Why were millions of people previously considered “normal” now overweight? Why were they being tarred with the same brush of mortality, as James’s critics would argue, as those who are genuinely obese?

Read more

Opinion:

It’s beautiful…

The companies that make you fat, also make a profit from trying to make you slim… but you just keep getting fatter, so BigPharma step in with ‘pills’ and you still keep getting fatter.

The psychology is there for all to see.

Let’s look at pre-1980.

That was before the big companies started making so many prepared foods and recreational snacks.

You ate at home, you ate what your mother cooked, and you didn’t get fat.

Post-1980 mother had to go to work, she didn’t have time to cook, you started eating ‘TV Dinners’ and snacking outside the home, and you got fat.

Do you see the equation here?

It is simple.

Mothers at home, obesity goes, mothers at work, obesity prevails.

But of course that doesn’t work any more. Because the mothers at home have forgotten how to be pre-1980s mothers. Remember when Home Ec (home economics and cooking) used to be a subject at school, mandatory for all girls. What happened to Home Ec? It disappeared!

Who made it go ‘whoosh’?

Ah, this is where the skulduggery comes in. Lobbyists! Lobbyists lobbying for the food companies convinced the education department that Home Ec wasn’t necessary.

Of course it was vital that Home Ec disappeared, so that new mothers didn’t know they were feeding their families on corporate profit-making fat-generating shit!

Bring back 1950s mothers, bring back Home Ec it’s the only solution.

Here’s the crunch!

Everything that corporations try to sell you that is ‘diet’, ‘light’, ‘low cholesterol’, ‘zero calories’ is bullshit! Pure bullshit!

Because the artificial sweeteners they use are worse than the original products. Aspartame, sucralose, HFCS, these products are POISON! And they are in every diet product on the planet. They have adverse effects on every organ in your body, from your brain to your big toe.

But governments will never step in to prevent these products from being used, BECAUSE THE CORPORATIONS WON’T LET THEM!

The governments are a façade, the real owners of the world are corporations, the real owners of you are the corporations. The governments are just the puppets to make you slaves feel good; yes, you are slaves, you have lost control, you are controlled.

Wake up!

 

Smell the coffee!

… and I don’t mean Starbucks!

 

 

 

 

 

Make you Fink on Friday

Fast food and takeaways linked to surge in child asthma and allergies

Teenagers more likely to have severe asthma and eczema if they eat fast food more than three times a week, study shows

Fast food was the only type of food associated with asthma and allergies across all ranges and countries, the study shows. Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Guardian

A diet of fast food and takeaways may be behind the steady surge in children’s asthma and allergies affecting the UK and other developed countries, according to a study.

An international collaboration of scientists has found that young teenagers in particular are nearly 40% more likely to have severe asthma if they eat burgers and other types of fast food more than three times a week. Children aged six to seven had an increased risk of 27%. Children eating fast food were also more likely to get severe eczema and rhinitis – a condition where the nose blocks or runs and the eyes are itchy and water.

The scientists, from New Zealand, Spain, Australia and Germany as well as Nottingham in the UK, say their study could have “major public health significance owing to the rising consumption of fast foods globally” if the link they have found turns out not to be coincidence but causal.

The good news was that eating fruit appeared to protect young people from asthma and allergies. Eating three or more portions a week reduced the severity of the symptoms by 11% among teenagers and 14% among younger children.

 

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Should or Shouldn’t

Monday Moaning

Six years ago

The Latvian government banned the selling of unhealthy foods and beverages (especially sodas, including Pepsi and Coca Cola) in schools and kindergartens in order to promote healthier snacks for pupils. Anything that is not natural and contains artificial ingredients, food additives, preservatives, flavours, colouring, sweeteners, caffeine and a high salt/food ratio are considered to be an unhealthy food or beverage.

That was in 2006.

.

Today…

Fast-food ban near schools proposed to fight child obesity

THE GOVERNMENT is considering introducing a ban on fast-food outlets near schools, following the publication of a report on obesity in nine-year-olds.

Minister for Children Frances Fitzgerald said yesterday she was in discussions with the Department of the Environment to see if planning regulations could be introduced to control the proximity of fast-food businesses to schools.

“When you walk out of a school, if the first thing you see is a fast-food shop, clearly that’s not in the child’s best interests.”

Source: IrishTimes Read more

Opinion:

Is the tail not trying to wag the dog here?

Are we not barking up the wrong tree?

To me the answer is logical. Ban the production of problem foods!

…or, the alternative: Tax them beyond the reach of those most affected.

There are many answers to the problems, the prohibition of ingredients known to be prejudicial to health, HFCSs, artificial flavours and colourings for example.

Aspartame this, aspartame that

The main problem cited in the countries like France, Canada and Russia where the bans are in place is obesity; but it goes way beyond just obesity. The problems stem to behavioural patterns, cognitive development, social interactions, bodily growth and functions, neurological disorders and more.

The problem affects our very being; and yet that is not important, as long as the corporations can make a profit, the health and welfare of the people is of no concern.

Since the 1960s we have abdicated our responsibilities as parents. Each generation is abdicating more and more.

An now we get responses like this when kids are asked about junk food restrictions: “I think that’s mean because junk food is pretty good”.

The kids have no idea anymore, less idea than their parents had no idea about. Parental control is gone, the kids have been brainwashed by more and more corporate advertising, so much that they don’t know what the facts are any more than their parents did.

One of two things has to happen; firstly parents have to get their shit together, second, if that doesn’t happen, then the state has to become a nanny.