There's no such thing as bad food, eh?
There's no such thing as bad food, eh?
Old fashioned prejudices and financial cynicism have been driving our fight against obesity in the wrong direction. I've long thought so. Now at last there's evidence showing that society has been wasting a lot of time, effort and money, with a campaign based on ignorance. Public health policy has been literally getting it backwards. The EarlyBird Diabetes Study has been following the progress of some 300 children in the Plymouth area - and researchers have found that it is fatness that causes children to be inactive NOT inactivity that causes fat. What causes fat is bad food, high in trans fats, sugar and salt. The sort of food peddled to us by a hugely wealthy and influential food industry. This is backed up by many obesity experts around the world. But no-one in public health has really wanted to listen because it rails against our long held prejudices that fat people are lazy. Fat kids are lazy. Get kids puffing and panting on an exercise bike, put them through a bit of torture and they'll quickly lose weight. Except they won't. They'll just get red in the face, upset and ashamed. But we like being cruel to fatties in this country. Just look at the titles of favourite reality tv shows like "Bulging Brides" or 'Too Big To Walk". These programmes reflect the great British need to feel smug - and fatties are the soft targets.
No wonder we have always presumed that our kids are fat because they're lazy. Fat is a moral failure, we presume. We couldn't possibly point the finger of blame at our penny-pinching school meals providers, could we? Or at our bloated, hugely profitable food industry? Nor even at our advertising-obsessed consumer culture? Yet this new research suggests that it's what we're eating that's making us fat, not our lack of exercise - though there's no doubt we are less active than we humans have ever been. A quarter of all British children are fat - many of them obese. Food is making them fat. Fat is making them inactive. It's a simple equation. We are what we eat. Why has it taken us so long to accept this simple truth? Because it's so much easier to patronise fatties, and prescribe an exercise programme than change what we are feeding them. And its so much easier for a government to tell us its all our fault, rather than point the blame at the Food Industry, and force them into healthier ways. Just last month, the new health secretary Andrew Lansley suggested that Jamie Oliver's school meals campaign hadn't worked. We've been improving the standards of school meals, he said, for about four years. It's cost millions, yet still the obesity rates are unaffected. Did he really think things would change that fast? And does he really think we should go back to the Turkey Twizzlers? I think that would be a moral atrocity. We might all worry since Andrew Lansley has also declared that there's no such thing as bad food, just a bad diet. But that's untrue. There is bad food, and it is prevalent in our national diet. Cheap burgers made of mechanically recovered meat, bristling with saturated fats, additives, sugar and salt, up to 48% water and often containing trans fats. These are not just an occasional treat for children, they're everyday fare marketed with the full force of big industry. How come we are not banning outright such evils as trans fats? They're a danger to our health. NICE says they should be outlawed, but nothing happens. I welcome this research from the guys at Peninsula Medical School. Because at last they have dared to speak the uncomfortable truth. Tackling obesity is not about eating less and exercising more (although that's always a good idea given our toxic lifestyle) - it's about what our kids are putting into their mouths. I’ll never forget the story of the kids taking part in an obesity study in Brazil. They were so fat they could hardly walk. Their families, their schools, their peers thought they were fat and lazy and so even they themselves became convinced they were losers. Their quality of life was, according to the doctors, as bad as kids undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. They were each given gastric bypasses, to save their lives and then an amazing transformation occurred. As they lost weight, they gained energy and wanted to go out and kick a football, and run and skip and play. Just like regular kids. They weren't lazy after all. It hadn't been laziness that had caused the fat - it was the other way around, and fat had caused the inactivity. Clearly, activity, health, food and culture are all inextricably entwined to produce a catastrophic downward spiral in some children's health. Obesity is a complex issue, not simple as our prejudices would have us believe. |
