all they can really do is educate people and make suggestions, otherwise they’re stuck with daft legislation such as banning fast food outlets near schools, as if it will do much, and banning sweets from close to counters, as if that will do much.
If they wanted to be draconian and ban types of food, there’s all sorts of stuff liable to go, from fast food outlets up to luxury food outlets.
BTW, I thought the Guardian though we were on the verge of starvation, with middle class people unable to afford food, etc
Ironic, given the country was just shut down for over 2 years because of the flu
Make calories easier to count.
Create a new unit of calories, where 100 kcal = 1 foodie.
Then make all manufacturers of packaged food, put the number of foodies for the entire contents of the packet, on the front in a standardised graphic.
Not per potion… The whole fucking thing. People are more than capable of dividing a number by two or four, or whatever. But the truth is, often people will be eating the entire packet anyway.
Shove the graphic smack bang on the front. The foodie graphic should take up no less than 20% of the front packaging real estate.
Make fast food staff tell customers the foodie count of their order, with each order they’re about to place.
Then you run a constant advertising campaign telling people they should be eating around 20 foodies a day if they’re a woman, and 22 a day if they’re a man.
At this point, it’s basically impossible not to count calories. Everyone will do it subconsciously.
Someone will now mention that calories in and calories out, is not the be all and end all of nutrition. And they’d be right, it is more complicated than that.
But not by much.
Obesity and overreating should be treated like any other addiction. Of course excluding those with conditions that affect their metabolism.
Being a fat f**k is no one else’s fault but their own.
Now, perhaps this is a controversial idea, but as the NHS owes something to the people in the form of healthcare provision, people also owe *at least something* to the NHS to avoid incurring unnecessary resource costs to a limited system.
This ought to be one of the foundational principles of a socialised healthcare system, as opposed to the private healthcare system such as America’s, where even before Covid there were 500,000 bankruptcies on average per year due to medical debt.
While, of course, there are many reasons, including metabolic disorders, that people are unable to lose weight – which we should be understanding of – obesity is still the single biggest controllable indicator for ill health later in life, which is expensive to treat and also unpleasant to suffer with. If you believe anything different – I’m sorry, the “healthy at any size” advocates have lied to you in the most insidious way, by telling you what you want to believe.
This is going to become a crisis in the near future as the average person gets fatter and fatter. It’s partially the high availability of unhealthy fast foods, but it’s also the lack of tasty, cheap and healthy alternatives.
This problem has roots in our cities, which have been designed to be too accommodating to cars and not accommodating enough to pedestrians. It’s in parents having to drive their kids school because their school is not in a low-traffic neighborhood, or was built on a main road. It’s in youth centres and other free or low-cost activities for children, teens, young adults, adults – *everyone* – being cut, which leads them to develop the habit of sitting at home on their consoles and phones, and it’s in the workday being too long for over half the year, so it’s already dark by the time you’re off work. And who wants to run at night?
Shaming people into losing weight does not work, in fact statistically speaking it causes them to gain further weight. But there are so many creative unexplored paths, all of which entirely in compatibility with maintaining a free society – which we as a country seem determined to not take because they are difficult and require changing a lot of the fundamentals of how we move and work as a society. And God Forbid we piss off the 15-minute-cities conspiracy theorists frothing about how a new Iron Curtain is going to be put up around segments of Doncaster.
6 comments
all they can really do is educate people and make suggestions, otherwise they’re stuck with daft legislation such as banning fast food outlets near schools, as if it will do much, and banning sweets from close to counters, as if that will do much.
If they wanted to be draconian and ban types of food, there’s all sorts of stuff liable to go, from fast food outlets up to luxury food outlets.
BTW, I thought the Guardian though we were on the verge of starvation, with middle class people unable to afford food, etc
Ironic, given the country was just shut down for over 2 years because of the flu
Make calories easier to count.
Create a new unit of calories, where 100 kcal = 1 foodie.
Then make all manufacturers of packaged food, put the number of foodies for the entire contents of the packet, on the front in a standardised graphic.
Not per potion… The whole fucking thing. People are more than capable of dividing a number by two or four, or whatever. But the truth is, often people will be eating the entire packet anyway.
Shove the graphic smack bang on the front. The foodie graphic should take up no less than 20% of the front packaging real estate.
Make fast food staff tell customers the foodie count of their order, with each order they’re about to place.
Then you run a constant advertising campaign telling people they should be eating around 20 foodies a day if they’re a woman, and 22 a day if they’re a man.
At this point, it’s basically impossible not to count calories. Everyone will do it subconsciously.
Someone will now mention that calories in and calories out, is not the be all and end all of nutrition. And they’d be right, it is more complicated than that.
But not by much.
Obesity and overreating should be treated like any other addiction. Of course excluding those with conditions that affect their metabolism.
Being a fat f**k is no one else’s fault but their own.
Now, perhaps this is a controversial idea, but as the NHS owes something to the people in the form of healthcare provision, people also owe *at least something* to the NHS to avoid incurring unnecessary resource costs to a limited system.
This ought to be one of the foundational principles of a socialised healthcare system, as opposed to the private healthcare system such as America’s, where even before Covid there were 500,000 bankruptcies on average per year due to medical debt.
While, of course, there are many reasons, including metabolic disorders, that people are unable to lose weight – which we should be understanding of – obesity is still the single biggest controllable indicator for ill health later in life, which is expensive to treat and also unpleasant to suffer with. If you believe anything different – I’m sorry, the “healthy at any size” advocates have lied to you in the most insidious way, by telling you what you want to believe.
This is going to become a crisis in the near future as the average person gets fatter and fatter. It’s partially the high availability of unhealthy fast foods, but it’s also the lack of tasty, cheap and healthy alternatives.
This problem has roots in our cities, which have been designed to be too accommodating to cars and not accommodating enough to pedestrians. It’s in parents having to drive their kids school because their school is not in a low-traffic neighborhood, or was built on a main road. It’s in youth centres and other free or low-cost activities for children, teens, young adults, adults – *everyone* – being cut, which leads them to develop the habit of sitting at home on their consoles and phones, and it’s in the workday being too long for over half the year, so it’s already dark by the time you’re off work. And who wants to run at night?
Shaming people into losing weight does not work, in fact statistically speaking it causes them to gain further weight. But there are so many creative unexplored paths, all of which entirely in compatibility with maintaining a free society – which we as a country seem determined to not take because they are difficult and require changing a lot of the fundamentals of how we move and work as a society. And God Forbid we piss off the 15-minute-cities conspiracy theorists frothing about how a new Iron Curtain is going to be put up around segments of Doncaster.