http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi
I was browsing the news, and came across, in the same day, two stories (admittedly inspired by the same event) bemoaning modern diets, and blaming modern health problems on them.
People are becoming obsessed with diets: eat less fat, eat more vegetables, eat less sugar, and this is supported by government, charity and media campaigns about our health.
Here we have a rather sad report that most people do not see treats as treats, but as perfectly normal. I'd agree that it's sad news, but more because of what is says about modern psychological attitudes. When it comes to diet, I'm only beginning to care, but not for the reasons I'm told to.
I care that there are no king-sized chocolate bars, that all crisps are now low-fat and that snacks such as sausage rolls and Peperami are now low-fat and low-calorie. I care that the frozen pizzas that I rely on as quick meals when I'm in a rush are gradually lowering their calorie content.
The reason is partly consumer pressure (king-size bars were deliberately removed, apparently), and partly market forces as a result of consumer tastes. Consumer tastes have been influenced in this regard by these health campaigns.
Now it's all very well wanting people to be healthy, but am I really going to be healthy if I expend 5,000 KCal a day and only manage to eat 4,500 because my pizzas have had their content reduced by 500? Am I going to be healthy if instead of one low-calorie pizza I eat two, and consume 6,500 KCal a day?
I'd have thought it obvious that quantity of food was far more important than calorie content. I also feel obliged to point out the less obvious fact that low fat often means high sugar, which is probably even less healthy.
Meanwhile children are fed skimmed milk, not given red meat, but instead brought up on insipid food with reduced nutritional value. If I had a bowl of cereal with full-fat milk, would I need a packet of crisps at mid-morning? The problem of wanting it all is affecting our nation's health not because we expect treats like chocolate, but because we expect to eat too much food and not grow fat from it. And if we feed children insipid foods, they will pester us for snacks in between meals.
So supermarkets are under pressure not to store chocolates at children's eye level, and various people have called for a fat tax on foods rich in calories. But it's not the calories that are the problem. It's the people's wanton gluttony. You can grow fat from eating too much muesli and organic chicken if you try hard enough.
And this inability to resist temptation is apparent in other parts of the campaigns, such as the desire to restrict advertising, and remove snacks from where children can see them. Why should children not know what exists simply because you are too weak to say 'no'? Why should children be malnourished simply because their parents cannot limit their intake quanititively, and therefore buy and share food with minimal nutritional value?
And, here is why I am beginning to care, why should I pay the same amount for food that has less nutritional value for me? I realise that in a free market market forces decide what is best, but here I suspect that market forces are being manipulated by ignorance. These health campaigns are what are persuading people to buy low fat products, and so companies follow the purchases.
But 100 doses of 30 calories will be just as bad as 30 doses of 100 calories. Eventually people will make themselves fat unless they can learn to control their desires and resist temptation. All the modern health campaigns are doing is ensuring that people spend more money on their ill-health. People clearly do not care about cost when it comes to desires; if they did no-one would smoke.
So raising prices of nutritional food will simply make life more expensive for those people who are capable of managing temptation, and as a consequence buy and eat good food. It will make it more expensive to feed children properly on staple foods such as cheese. And it will make exercise an even more expensive hobby.
Which brings me nicely onto the other great unspoken problem. Exercise is a far better way of dealing with fat than dieting. And yet gym membership costs a few hundred pounds a year.
We're bombarded with messages about diet, but as many (mostly fat) cynics point out, dieting leads to metabolic abnormalities, 'starvation mode' and rebound obesity. And yet these mostly fat and lazy cynics fail to point out that exercise suffers none of these problems. "Dieting is bad for you", I've seen it said, "so being fat isn't bad"!
I know I could have written this a little more succinctly, but it seems to me that our health campaigns are focussing on precisely the wrong thing. We're being urged to change our diets through spending money on 'healthy' foods, when the cheaper solution would be to spend less money on food.
If people aren't into cheap, it must be because it is hard for them to try other solutions. But given the huge effect that health campaigns have managed to have on people's purchases, it would make far more sense if they were encouraged instead to eat less or do more exercise, or stop giving in to children's demands for treats all the time.
But here's the rub. People are so unwilling to resist temptation that instead of accepting the consequences, they are asking for temptation to be removed, even though it removes benefits from those upright citizens who can control themselves. And the government and charities are playing along, avoiding focussing on the real solution or the real problem.
Which is a problem not with foods that we're being sold, nor with greedy corporations marketing unhealthy foods to us. It's not even with greedy corporations marketing nutritionless foods to us so that we have to buy more of them, nor even with people eating too much and doing too little exercise.
It's a wider problem than that, a problem of which eating too much is only a symptom, and it's that people simply will not take responsibility for their own actions, nor act responsibly. Our health problems are a result of laziness and irresponsibility, but that's not a message that people will accept. They wont accept it because...? Because they're too busy giving themselves treats simply because of the intention or effort to do well that they don't have time for criticism.
I agree that we have a crisis, but it won't be solved by changing the prices of food. If we somehow engineer the food market so that no-one can get fat, people's laziness and irresponsibility will remain, and disrupt other aspects of life.
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