Credit: PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty
Over the past few months, my waistband has been slowly but irrevocably expanding. I now look as if I have been melted and poured into my trousers, when before they were merely ‘snug’. There is no give left. I asked the scales and they didn’t lie: I have this year added around five kilograms to my formerly willowy frame.
In normal times I might shrug and attempt to rectify the situation by taking the stairs, instead of the lift, or with a lazy trip to the shops in search of a bigger waistband. But, alas, these are not normal times; according to new research from the Government, the more bulk I put on, the greater my risk of becoming seriously ill if I contract Covid-19. I’ve no choice but to lose this extra upholstery — and swiftly.
I’m not alone. A study by King’s College London found that almost half (48%) of those questioned admitted they had put on weight during lockdown. Boris Johnson, too, says he was “way overweight” when he contracted the virus. And just under two-thirds (63%) of adults in Britain are officially classed as overweight or obese; the UK has consistently ranked as one of Europe’s fattest nations.
Following his brush with death, the PM has undergone something of a damascene conversion. Once at the head of the charge against the nannying approach to tackling obesity; now he is wringing his hands, urging us to “do our bit” and fight that flab.
Partly in response to the pandemic, but also concerned with the nation’s health as a whole, the Government has unveiled a series of measures to tackle this obesity ‘time bomb’. So we have a ban on junk food advertising before the 9pm ‘watershed’, along with a prohibition on supermarket two-for-one offers. Calorie counts will also need to be added to menus in chain restaurants and cafes that employ over 250 people.
Tackling the junk food ads must have looked like an easy win. They currently appear up to nine times an hour at children’s peak viewing times. And kids who watched over three hours of television per day were almost three times more likely to buy junk food products than children who watched little or no television.
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SubscribeWell said all but I believe the food environment is the biggest problem with food giants making huge profits on cheap food, the more of which we eat the more we want to eat, they make it addictive. The low fat message in the 70’s/80’s was one of the biggest drivers of obesity along with the meat is bad message now, it makes me want to cry. How many of us were obese pre these dates. We have moved away from real food, if it ran, swam, fly or grew it’s healthy if it comes in a packet it very likely isn’t, especially if it has 5+ ingredients. The government should be talking to alternative experts: The Public Health Collaboration, Aseem Malhotra, Zoe Harcombe, David Unwin, Ivor Cummins to name a few.
Fully agree Wendy. The problem with the government advising us about nutrition is that the government doesn’t know what good nutrition is.
No but BoJo is having his Prodigal Son moment. That’s all it is.
In general, I reckon government doesn’t know enough about normal people’s lives to advise them on their life choices – and when the narrative of research surrounding diet is conflicted, it makes a difficult issue harder.
We know that obesity raises health risks, especially at ages over 40, and most people now know what we mean by ‘junk food’: yet I have many sad and sometimes grisly tales from doctor friends, who like Wendy are seeing a rising tide of obesity-related health issues.
People mostly seem to eat whatever ‘feels good’, for whatever reason, at any time. If you want to reduce comfort eating, look into why so many people are engaged in a practice they know to be self-destructive.
Eh, Cummins? Na, not another “experts” OMG. All folk need to do is recognise the mental health aspect of comfort-eating and start to acknowledge it. They might then start to think about its cause. Food is an emotional matter anyway, not a rational one. If you are knackered and a drive-thru suddenly pops up, sage advice goes whizzing out of the car window far quicker than cash.
I might add that anyone who thinks it takes half an hour to cook a piece of broccoli is just demonstrating their abysmal ignorance. 6 minutes in the microwave with just a drop of water is more than sufficient.
Or, use the hob in half the time with the same amount of water and a lid on the saucepan? But by the time they’d finished work for that scandalous employer, any recipe would have felt hours too long; read his acct!
Omg no 3 minutes in boiling water. Overcooked broccoli is an insult.
I like 3:30 in cold water, covered loosely. FYI superheated water is a thing you can do in microwaves, which is why you should be careful with hot water in them (unless you like the way that explosive steam formation tends to re-decorate the inside of the microwave https://www.animations.physics.unsw.edu.au/jw/superheating.htm)
A note to the cabinet: Just leave us alone! Stop nagging! You are supposed to be liberal Tories for F’s sake. It’s not as though you have shown any sign of competence anyway, so lets us enjoy life in our own strange ways. If I’d wanted to be repressed I could have voted Corbyn.
If we want to get fat and die young it will save all those social care and dementia costs. Same as those who fall off horses, rock faces, and down ski slopes. We should get a tax rebate paid into our estates for our public spiritedness.
Smokers used the same argument to justify not kicking the habit.
I wish they were conservative Tories to be honest. Much prefer that to liberal ones.
Problem is Peter you will die a bit younger but along the way you rack up health costs that are crippling the NHS, which I see every day, because of poor diet and it just isn’t sustainable. Plus these people who ‘save’ on social costs have a miserable end to the last 10-20 yrs of their lives often needing a lot of social care!
Speaking as one who enjoys falling off rock faces….
I know the risks – and I’d rather have my carpal tunnel/trigger finger combo than the heart disease/diabetes duo that seems to follow bad diet around.
Getting fat doesn’t mean dying young – arthritis treatments are cheaper and less scary than 40 years’ worth of statins, stents, angiograms, etc.
I’m generally anti-intervention – but have to admit that obesity (and obesity-correlated illness) is racking up huge public health costs. That said, I’d rather see positive reinforcement – say, incentives on low-mileage fresh produce – than the negative reinforcement that is prevalent in so much policy lately.
Richard Horton openly supported Wakefield calling him a committed, charismatic and engaging scientist and clinician. He retracted the paper after 12 years under pressure from the GMC. The 2008/9 outbreak of measles was without doubt influenced by this in the UK and North America. Horton went on to interfere in the GMC hearing of Roy Meadow over the Sally Clarke trial when Meadow was struck off by publishing a supporting article on the morning of the first day of Meadow’s defence. Sally Clarke served 3 years in gaol for killing her children and later was found dead at home.Then there was the open letter to Gaza, Sir Mark Peyps said “Horton’s behaviour in this case is consistent with his longstanding and wholly inappropriate use of The Lancet as a vehicle for his own extreme political views. It has greatly detracted from the former high standing of the journal.” This year with covid he said in late January that the virus has moderate transmissibility and relatively low pathogenicity. An about face was done a few days later. In May he was interviewed on a Chinese news channel praising the Chinese response whilst decrying other countries for criticising the Chinese government. He supports Extinction Rebellion and believes all medical practitioners should do so. I take no lessons from Richard Horton.
Indeed. Seeing the Lancet described as a high quality journal drew a bark of derision. It hasn’t been that for ages. It’s one up from the Veterinary Record.
Agree with the gist of the article: a quick knee jerk simple response is nowhere near a well worked out strategy to deal with a complex problem. Advertising is one small part , but it sits alongside the much bigger problems of our increasingly sedentary lifestyles, the incredible cheapness of manufactured, sugary / fatty carbohydrates loaded convenience food and the endless supply of snacks.
I think this is just the latest of Johnson’s ( Cummings) strategy of continually announcing new ( or not so new ) idea. Makes him seem as if he is dynamic and on top of things just as during the worst of the pandemic in the UK we had daily announcement of ‘ ramping up testing’ billions of pieces of PPE on order, millions of testing kits on order . Usually followed by hushed news about PPE , or tests etc that don’t work.
That sounds about right but jeekers how v condescending! I think PM is personalizing too much.
The author vastly understates the case against MMR.
An obvious example: why vaccinate babies against rubella? They are hardly likely to get pregnant and, in the case of males, never.
Furthermore, what is the ethical case for forcing medical treatment on someone as a child for someone else’s benefit?
I note the author doesn’t even mention rubella in his apart from the abbreviation ‘MMR’.
I inderstand that MMR vaccine provides lifelong protection. It’s easiest to vaccinate people when done as part of a campaign.
The R part is superfluous in males of course. But once formulated as a triple you can’t take a component out.
What is the basis Pof claiming kids are vaccinated for others’ sole benefit!!?
Herd immunity requires vaccinating both boys and girls against rubella.
But if all the girls were immune, would it matter if males were susceptible?
Vaccines do not provide herd immunity. In a large percentage vaccines do not achieve desired effects and vaccines wear off in 2-10 years. Real immunity does not wear off. Herd immunity comes from naturally acquired disease, not vaccine pretend ‘immunity.’
I’ve always been a sceptic when it comes to the recommendations of government or any other authority. I try and check it out for myself.
I’m 70 years old and have been married for 41 years. My wife tends to do most of the cooking ” though I’ve been known to bake bread, and to knock up a tasty cooked meal of a traditional kind. I love traditional fries, which I have about three times a week; and if I can, I will fry the meats in animal lard ” it tastes much better, especially if I have rendered it myself using a few choice herbs. But that “unhealthy” food is balanced by eating a very mixed diet, with plenty of vegetables, most of them grown on our allotment. On the whole neither of us likes processed foods very much ” though we’ll occasionally splash out on a luxury cake from Waitrose or something like that. When we were raising our four children it was no different. I get plenty of exercise, and am generally considered pretty fit for my age, despite the limitations of arthritis.
You might be thinking that it’s all very well for me, having an allotment in the first place and being in the place where I can make choices without worrying too much about the cost of the food I’m eating. I’m not unaware that I am in a much better position than many in this country, let alone in others. However, Mr Bloodworth raises a point that renders arguments of resentment irrelevant:
Foodbanks show this up; and I speak as someone who occasionally helps in one, and who is familiar with food banks in a number of towns and cities. Even in cities with a large population of people of Chinese or Indian origin, those people are rarely seen in food banks. Some of the reasons can be that their own communities are better than ours at communal care; but more fundamental is that they know how to cook and how to get cheap, nourishing food that will go a long way. Go to any Asian food market and you will see the sacks or boxes of pulses and other dried foods that you can buy by the bagful. One bag will form the basis for many meals; and it will have cost less than one frozen, basic, ready-meal.
My wife has repeatedly pointed out that those who have encouraged the decline of “Home economics” as a core subject in our secondary schools have much to answer for. It is falling to the combined forces of economic utilitarianism. academicisation, and feminist dogma. When I did my O-levels and A-levels, in 1966″“’68, one lad in our class attracted a lot of attention because he wanted to “join the girls” by doing Home Economics, and the school’s head of that subject was an outstanding cook. The school had to make a few contortions to make it possible; but they did it, and he went on to be a pretty successful chef.
I worked as a health Visitor during the Wakefield era. I unlike most of my colleagues worked with the GP I was assigned to, to get rates up ,This included doing home visits and most families were happy to go along with having the missing vaccines. The MMR was different , I was accused of being a government agent when pointing out the flawed research. One lady who had her elder son vaccinated with MMR
refused for second. The second son unfortunately was diagnosed later on autistic spectrum I am sure the mother would have convinced many more not to have the vaccine if she had consented. We did have a few cases of measles confirmed by swabs taken after recovery and sent to the Colindale lab. But I I like many colleagues have not been convinced by the flu vaccines. So I might be a nut too if I don’t rush for the new one.T cells check would make me happier.
A question and hypothesis for which I’d like to be disabused, if it’s faulty.
Question: it seems to me that the annual flu jab, largely for elderly people, is primarily intended to extend their life; whereas most other jabs seem to be for diseases for the young that would severely harm the rest of their life or kill them in their youth.
Hypothesis: if we are simply extending the life of largely elderly people by this jab, are we not building up an ever-increasing pool of people who (in previous days) would already have died from the flu and therefore now represent a larger-than-heretofore group who are especially vulnerable to respiratory viruses, whether a severe flu or a novel coronavirus? In other words, thanks to the flu jabs over recent years has the pool of vulnerable elderly become inflated? Has our novel coronavirus not killed sizeable numbers who, but for the flu jab, would already have been dead otherwise?
Please pick this apart.
Your conjecture is accurate. A significant portion of healthcare costs are consumed in keeping our elder citizens healthy and alive. Some times this is driven more By the desire of relatives than the recipient. Unfortunately western culture has a very hard time accepting that death is inevitable.
Whereas, you would happily celebrate the news that one of your loved ones was about to die?
I am not as sad about such news when the person is elderly, already ill & had confided that they’re “not much enjoying life these days”. This is very common for those banished to ‘care homes’.
I won’t be attending. I’ve the means to be helped at home. I’ve no desire to live to a ripe age. Seventy something is quite enough. I’m sixty at present.
Well said. Much of modern medicine is sourced in staving off death and dooming people to mere and often painful existence. We have no respect for death in today’s world and that is delusional.
Quality of life is what matters.
Yes you are quite right. We need to get rid of the wisdom and experience which is holding the country back.
Yes, you’re correct. We vaccinate because we can. Not only does flu vaccination extend the lives of some, but we end up with a large & unusually vulnerable older cohort. Is it possible that nations who’ve adopted annual flu vaccination most enthusiastically are those countries with highest covid19 deaths?
Favouring that hypothesis is the interesting negative correlation between death rates in the last two winters & numbers of covid19 deaths. It’s quite a marked correlation.
As Julia Hartley Brewer points out in the DT, the govt is all over the place. They offer us vouchers to eat out but want us to lose weight (a contradiction I called out the moment they announced this silly little gimmick). Then they give us money off bicycle repairs or whatever without building useful bicycle lanes. (If you want to overwhelm the NHS, send my cyclists on to the roads…)
Honestly, I thought it was impossible to beat New Labour for nonsense and hopelessness, but this lot are daft beyond all belief.
The contradiction between encouraging eating out and losing weight is rather over-stated though, you can eat out and choose healthy dishes.
I’m sure a counter-argument could be made, that a meal from a good restaurant made from fresh ingredients is likely to be as healthy, if not healthier than many processed foods people eat at home.
We can argue until the cows come home on the relative prices of different food and their availability now and in the past. What matters is how people eat now.
The point no-one has made is that much eating is passive. Buy a multipack of crisps, whether the packet contains 5 packets or 25, those packets will be eaten over the same time period. The same applies to biscuits, sweets and many other foodstuffs
Now compare food packet sizes in 1960, when the whole food scene first started explodng (I know I remember it) and food packet sizes now and most will now be at least twice as large as they used to be. So, control packet sizes. Multipack crisps and snacks should come in multiples of 5 small (previously standard) packs only, biscuits packets must all weigh 250 grammes or less. The same with almost every packaged food. Butter still comes in 250 gramme/8 oz packs, so should all other spreads of this nature.
By reducing package size you are reducing the amount people buy and the amount they eat. Gathering three packets of a product is a lot more fiddly than picking up a multipack of three.
The government has a ‘nudge unit’ which is meant to think about things like this. Why haven’t they?
I’m a conservative US Republican, active in the party and volunteer in campaigns and at the poles. Only once have I ever heard of a Q group. You make it sound like this is a significant group influencing our politics. The significant group influencing American politics are ignorant spoiled white “kids” who are being used by the communist party and other anti US groups.
Politicians who are trying g to claim that riots are peaceful demonstrations and that the virus is racist are the scary ones. If you want to write about a carnival start there.
Freedom of speech in America is close to gone, only political correctness is allowed by MSM and big tech. The news you receive in U.K. and Europe about the USA is only the liberal version. I saw this myself in recent trips abroad. These are the real issues in The US, not some tiny Q group.
In my humble opinion, there are two key aspects at the heart of the issue over the nation’s diet and neither are easily resolved; I think we’re going to be on this path for a generation or more yet unless there might be radical change. The first is education, it’s no coincidence that the better educated tend to enjoy healthier diets and lifestyles. Our education system is broken in any number of ways and so any change might take a long long time. The other point concerns vested interest involvement in and control of what we eat. We are effectively being poisoned by sugar intense, high carb low fat diets; it’s not only that people don’t cook it’s that supermarkets are awash with processed food with little nutritional benefit and considerable harm from added sugar and salt, artificial ingredients and even more added sugar. It’s in everything from bread to yogurt to alcohol to …….. The issue here is that the food industry is set up to deliver to us processed foods, the drug industry depends on us becoming diabetic, suffering from dementia etc etc. And vested interests manipulate political policy and direction and ultimately legislation, which allows this to happen. Forget worrying about chlorinated chicken, we already have more than enough problems and no small number imported from the USA.
Education is certainly key. We used to actually teach cooking but then Domestic Science became Food Technology and the rot set in.
Can someone fill me in on the evidence for vaccine efficacy? My understanding is the only real evidence is the decline in such diseases after vaccines were introduced, but if there’s other evidence, I’d be interested in it.
Correlation is not causation, as they say. In this case, the diseases were in decline already and continued their decline at the same rate post and pre-vaccine. This is on the CDC website, so it’s not made up. Second, Scarlet Fever and Typhoid fever were never vaccinated / not widely vaccinated and they declined, too.
The decline took place before vaccines appeared. That is a matter of record. Vaccines took the ‘glory’ for something achieved by better living conditions.
In 1977, Boston University epidemiologists (and husband and wife) John and Sonja McKinlay published the seminal work on the role vaccines (and other medical interventions) played in the massive decline in mortality seen in the twentieth century. They also warned about vested agendas profiteering by taking responsibility for the massive decline, i.e. vaccines.
Published in 1977 in The Millbank Memorial Fund Quarterly, the McKinlay’s study was titled, “The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century.” The study clearly proved, with data,
“that the introduction of specific medical measures and/or the expansion of medical services are generally not responsible for most of the modern decline in mortality.”
Here are some of the major points their paper made:
“¢92.3% of the mortality rate decline happened between 1900 and 1950 [before most vaccines existed]
“¢Medical measures “appear to have contributed little to the overall decline in mortality in the United States since about 1900″“having in many instances been introduced several decades after a marked decline had already set in and having no detectable influence in most instances.”
The decline in incidence of a disease after introduction of specific vaccinaton is on the face of it very good, some will say sufficient, evidence for its efficacy. Of course there may be other factors in play concurrently, also limiting the disease’s spread. Maybe society’s gratitude for the eradication of, say, smallpox and, hopefully soon, polio will have to be shared between good medicine (vaccines) and improvements to living conditions. But when you are in the middle of fighting an outbreak or epidemic, you will use all the means at your disposal, and that will include attempting to develop a vaccine to provide a good level of population immunity.
Throughout all the various discussions about obesity there is hardly any acknowledgement of the role of the individual. This is the one who can’t control their own urges to eat what is required, but has to eat more. It’s the fault of the adverts, or the Government, or the health service. Take responsibility for your own actions and the consequences and stop blaming others.
There is significant concern that using the flu vaccine in the presence of another virus with significant lethality is a bad idea. There is pilot data indicating the potential for worse outcomes following infection with a virus other than the one for which the vaccine is directed. Usually, flu is the most lethal virus around so vaccination against it is useful. Not so clear right now.
There is nothing mentioned here about alcohol. It is extremely calorific. I know several people who drink quite a lot and they are struggling with their weight.
I told one of said people this and they tried it they stopped drinking and lost several stone in a matter of weeks.
A lot of it is mental too it depends on how your brain works. Some people find it much more difficult to control their impulses and get stuck in bad habits. If you were also never taught to eat healthy and look after yourself then you will likely find it difficult to cook healthy meals, eat less and eat better food.
Why are children not taught to cook in school. It’s one of life’s basic necessities.
Lastly people have gotten used to having easy access to food and eat even when they don’t need too. We are supposed to feel hungry on a regular basis and by eating a little less and putting up with a little natural fasting it will help maintain a healthier weight. We don’t need to eat 2500 every single day.
The capacity for delayed gratification is taught in early childhood but if your current circs feel way too beyond your control, why not pig out? A lot of obese folk feel powerless; their size is a symptom of that. Give them hope – a way to take responsiility for their lives e.g. and the weight would fly off. Fat people feel and are emotionally stuck. It is uncomfy carrying too much timber; no one actively chooses uncomfort unless somewhere, it echos how they truely feel. It embodies an inner hopelessness. The gov needs to acknowledge how it is not helping the overweight to take charge of their own lives by giving them opportunities to change their circs for the better. Job/housing/education. Did you ever meet a happy obese person? Of course not. I know an overweight lad who lives in such a noisy hell-hole he can’t possibly do homework and yet it is only c/o quiet study alone that anything taught actually sinks in. In his environment, food is all he really has that’s a comfort.
Greed has only been possible with the onset of food subsidy. In 1970s, a Sunday roast was only really sensible say, twice a month; today, supermarket chicken costs a mere £3. The climate and human wastelines cannot cope with food subsidy and the green light it sheds on Greed. Ads will always trick people into greed; far better if prices reflected the global reality regarding the actual costs of food produce rather than instead used to promote western government’s protectionism. Greed of all forms will wipe the human race out.
Excellent point about the comparative costs of a Sunday roast 50 years ago and now. The same goes for clothes and for almost anything else, be it basic to living or a luxury.
There is something fundamentally wrong about the economics of food, which so often encourages monoculture growing and transporting the produce large distances for packaging, only for it to be transported back for sale in a shop a few hundred yards from the field in which it grew. Your points about greed and subsidy nail part of that fault.
Yes, I have often observed in recent years that a chicken was once an annual treat, to be put in the oven in June and taken out in October. These days they cost less than a cup of coffee and cook in about 20 minutes.
Such was the rarity of a chicken dinner as a child that when I snapped the wishbone ti was to the sound of massed applause as the whole street gathered round.
Ah! Thank you Mr Bailey for reviving my memories of the wish-bone. You’re right; and that story’s rather stronger evidence than any statistical analysis of chicken production.
In cooking, things were made to “go further” so that they no longer even resembled the wish bone from whence they’d sprung. If life is made too easy then, Joe Publican will inevitably blouse up & the climate is having the last wheezey gasp because a 24/7 have-it-all attitude is not actually sustainable. The 1980s got rid of the morally suspect side of Greed and our waist-lines have been in progressively hearty agreement ever since. Class, mental health, race, income , residential status& education have little to do with how free&easy consumption has become: Greed is seen as A Good Thing, when it is not. Governments want more expenditure, not yr v good health.
Life has just got way too flabby(easy) and Goverments are jus “luvin-it”. Folk get the Gov they deserve tho!
Obviously I don’t agree with subsidising anything. But if my taxes are going to be spent in this way, I might as well get some return in the form of cheap food. I eat very well for about 15 pounds a week – meat, fish, vegetables, fruit – which offsets the rise in the costs of accommodation, energy, Council Tax, insurance, Premier Cru Burgundy and all the other scams.
It is as if the Foresight report 2007 ‘Tacking Obesities’ was never written, the concept of the ‘obesogenic environment’ is unknown and the concept of the ‘wider determinants of health’ is a mystery. The work of Prof Marmot (The Health Gap) and Wilkinson and Pickett (The Spirit level), Roberts and Edwards in ‘The Energy Glut’……. does anyone ever read anything? Underlying this is a lack of a theory of human agency, or rather an assumption that we can exercise free will as autonomous beings. Instead we are products of simultaneous biological, psychological and social mechanisms that are highly structured (by class, ethnicity and gender for example). We retain agency but not in the circumstances of our choosing. To reduce population obesity you need to act across several areas – Employment and poor wages; Housing and its quality; Active travel – walking and cycling; Urban Planning for fast food outlets (site and number) and of course on massive education on cooking and good food. This will take 20 years at least. The food industry – it is a collective action problem – could do far more as could all food outlets. Relying on individual behaviour change will not work, and we need far more than just a ‘nudge’.
I’m 62 grossly overweight , but still working . Reasons for weight drinking overeating as a reaction to stress and life time events , sometimes I need to eat and drink just to get away from it all . I’ve never been on benefit either
You see, pre 1980s, utilities and housing were cheap, but food, telephone and clothes were not. Our pressures and stresses have changed as have our responses.
I’m partial to a little vino for transcending it all too, but have you considered taking up heroin or methamphetamine instead of drinking? Infinitely better in terms of weight loss. And they will certainly make you forget life’s stresses (for a little while at least……)
How can we possibly have a campaign against obesity, waged by a PM who is the spitting image of Billy Bunter?
BoJo’s point in this increasingly personalised age is that as he wears the T-shirt, we should listen to him all the harder. But this is not actually about education; perfectly well-educated people went on smoking knowing full-well that it was a carcinogenic thing to do. Comfort-eating is about seeking to escape from uncomfy present-tense realities. This great national escape is massively assisted by how easy it is to overload one’s trolley, grab a takeaway, do a drive-thru & not least, Sunday trading. If food stopped being subsidised, and booze was 5 times the price, The Great Escape would seek another outlet, one which may be less easy on the eye than a nation of butter balls.
I don’t see a solution. We were thinner when we had to expend more energy, our houses were colder and food was more expensive and less available. Without banning car journeys, central heating, JCBs, etc and imposing bans and huge taxes on food and shortening shop opening hours, which we can’t do, not much will change.
And I forgot, we now have Deliveroo, etc. There really is no hope. You don’t have to get off the sofa and dinner comes to your door.
James, why not return to your former employer and lose that weight by running around an Amazon warehouse all day?
If you read his account you would not actually want to buy anything from his employer ever again. Employees were even cheated out of their short tea break. We wouldn’t treat animals that badly. His acct haunted me for weeks it was that shocking. When your life us that xxxx you don’t care what you eat.
Well, well Travis..My oh my. Are you in for a shock. Lol
Weird echoes of the Blood libel that “typically claim that Jews require human blood for the baking of matzos” used during Passover. How many Qanon adherents have ever heard of this ….
I’m not sure it does echo the Blood libel.
The blood libel had a certain “rhyme” to it, in that it mirrored transsubstantiation.
I don’t know what the QAnon adrenochrome conspiracy mirrors. I suppose it has a “this is a very important thing we are doing – stopping kids getting tortured – so we can be forgiven any minor mistakes we make” sort of feel to it.
I suspect that when they come up with a motivating myth that is better (read far, far, worse) they’ll abandon this one as not compelling enough.
Thank you very much for this, Daniel. There was no mention in your piece about Belarus’s membership in the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Belarus was a founding member of the EEU, along with Russia and Kazakhstan. The EEU now also includes Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. Unlike the EU, the EEU has so far been strictly an economic and not a political union. The EEU looks like an alliance of autocrats, although less so since the regime of President Sargszyan was toppled in 2018, an event that must give Belarusan opponents of Lukashenko hope. It doesn’t have to be like that though, and there is a logic to an economic alliance of countries that have much in common. Also, as the Ukrainians have found out to their chagrin, Brussels is not going to be as welcoming to any of the East Slavic republics joining the EU as it was to the Baltic States. Daniel, it would be interesting to have your thoughts on Belarus’s best choice for alliances under a post-Lukashenko government.
Coronavirus/covid19 has driven the world mad; especially writers, MSM employees, tv and other celebs.
Those whom the Gods would destroy etc.
Speaking of things being “oversized”, does the author not think that the Govt should start by slimming down the numbers in the civil service, PHE and NHS management/administrators, and all other quangos etc, even the numbers in HoC and HoL?
“How much you weigh is determined more by where you live and what type of job you do than how many adverts for hamburgers and Mars bars you are exposed to”
Wrong way round.
You live in posh areas because you had the self control and self denial to study hard and work hard, leading to big earning.
Everyone wants to be thin. It takes self control and self denial – whether it be exercising more or eating less. What exactly you eat makes very little difference – it’s the total calories, not whether it’s broccoli or a Big Mac.
How could you write a whole article on being overweight and not mention that it all comes down to the ability to delay ones gratification?
Not that being thin makes you happier.
But that’s a whole ‘nother story..
Spot on. Comfort-eating is also less comforting if you have a great job, wonderful partner, no neighbours from hell etc.
Believe me I’m no “equality of outcome” socialist, but your lack of understanding of poverty – and complete lack of empathy for the poor – is more than disturbing. One day you may wake up with nothing too, despite your (admirable) Protestant work ethic.
Absolutely. He has a very middle class view on the issue. Living in poverty through the 70/80s we weren’t obese because we didn’t have the choice of highly calorific foods at such low cost. True, eating was functional and had no joy, but being obese was equated with gluttony, a lack of self control. And whenever these issues are discussed, the discussion always includes mention of take-aways, which are a treat, from both a cost and calorific intake perspective. So for an £8 McDonalds meal consumed in the article, you could cook a healthy and balanced meal for 2, in 30 mins, using quality ingredients. You just need to make the effort, and not expect the govmt to fix the resulting issue of being obese.
I guess you’d class me as ‘paternalistic left’, then. Have a look in the food bank collection point next time you’re in a supermarket. It seems to me that the food bank users are given white bread, pasta, processed cereals and no fresh foods.
I can’t see how the number of recipes you know will change that to a healthy diet.
Browse the shop prices and see if you can honestly tell me that fresh foods are cheaper than processed. They aren’t. Compare the cost of wholemeal and white bread, empty of nutrition foods are cheap. I can’t see how that translates into ‘paternalistic left’.
I’ve just joined UnHerd because I enjoy the videos so much. I’ve now read 2 articles. Both turn out to be self opinionated supporters of the status quo, asserting unsubstantiated self entitlement. I think I’m leaving and I’ve only just got here!
James, it’s you who are being sanctimonious rather than the Government. You are also condescendingly denying the poor agency. Of course there is a correlation between where people live, their jobs and their weight but the former influences rather than determines the latter.
Of course it’s more complex than just telling people to eat more healthily but, actually, most people who are fat know they should lose weight and want to lose weight, just as most smokers want to quit. Encouragement and changing societal views have been very successful in reducing smoking and can be equally effective with obesity.
“To reduce population obesity you need to act across several areas – Employment and poor wages; Housing and its quality; Active travel – walking and cycling; Urban Planning for fast food outlets (site and number) and of course on massive education on cooking and good food.” Benny is absolutely right here. But instead of navel-gazing (literally) what can we do about it? What can WE as ordinary citizens do? I’d love to volunteer to help someone learn how to cook a healthy meal in 30 mins. Could we start some kind of scheme?
Association science is poor quality information. Desktop doodling by PhD students and lazy academics is not meant to end in the paper written before morning coffee using unverified numbers in a spreadsheet ripped off from an NHS server. Obesity is the classic confounding biological variable so often used and abused in such psuedoscience by one interest group or the other (pro food sales and obesity shamers). Obesity is not a choice. It is an outcome and while it brings with it many consequences it also has many aetiological origins in each affected individual that are not defined by an Excel spreadsheet and a little bit of undergraduate arithmetic. Such matters not only seem to be too much for those who think reading 140 characters in Twitter is an excuse for ignorance of journalism balanced news and verified information, but for many of our politicans and supposed leaders in Public Health (many of the current crop start as the millenial bioscience PhD students above). People afflicted by obesity do not choose that outcome and it does not bring them joy. They are rarely if ever happy or content and mostly feel powerless to change. They do not welcome the attention of superficial statistical association spread by media. Stereotyping types of food or sources as inherently good or inherently bad is trivial given the complexity of the biology of obesity and equally rescheduling food advertising beyond some watershed must be the last gasp of desperation. The principles of a complete approach to bariatric care have not changed in 50 years but neither has there been any interest in addressing the problem seriously far less funding it adequately.
If you’re going to ban junk food advertising then ban cookery programmes as well. I like cooking & am always looking out for new recipes. The odd time I’ve seen MasterChef etc I wonder how many people are watching, eating their takeaway from a tray on their lap. These programmes are counter productive as they show involved recipes, taking a fair bit of preparation & most people will think “I haven’t time to do that” & carry on with the burgers & chips. Sitting at the table is important as well. Taking time over eating your food, talking about whatever, is as much part of the experience. Everything has to be fast nowadays – why?
It seems to me that despite this and previous initiatives, people are still getting fatter and less fit(ter). So I am wondering whether a government decreed healthy diet is indeed “healthy”?
Our friend Lucy, who wandered the African Savannah millions of years back, did not have the benefit of government advice, or Sainsburys. However, she and her associates almost certainly lived the similar sort of lifespan that humans have always (sans slavery or wild animal attack) enjoyed…. Three score years and ten.
But what did she eat? Presumably what she ate is the closest we will ever get to understanding the human diet, she did what came naturally. And the natural human diet was comprised of what one could pick, we did not have farming or herding. Occasionally there would be a fresh animal corpse, or a lucky break from trapping a bird or something. But the main diet was fruit and nuts.
The fruit was for energy, since it is high in energy food aka sugar, and the nuts are high in fat, with a small amount of protein, these serve as lubrication for the brain and body, and the protein helps growth/repair.
So there we have it, the ideal human diet. Sugar and fat and not much else.
And what do our governments tell us? We need to cut out sugar and fat and replace it with wholly unhuman complex carbohydrates and tons of meat
I suspect there might be a hidden message here? Perhaps the government is more interested in helping big business and big pharma/farmer?
EDIT:
I forgot to mention that the way we use food is governed by a system called “osmosis”. It does not matter what is on one side of a “semi-permeable” membrane, it matters greatly what passes through that membrane and reaches the other side, and that is a bunch of molecules, rather than a steak or a salad or a Twix.
So our human needs are for sugar and fat that is easily digestible, the more complex the structure of the food we eat, so the more physical work our bodies have to do to perform this osmotic function.
So whether we get our sugar from a tin of Coke, or from a mango is pretty much irrelevant, since we don’t have coke (or mangos) running through our veins, what we have are the molecules that we call sugar.