Denmark introduces "fat tax"

Sakura, great minds think alike.

The Daily Mail is not that bad, not as bad as Gordon Brown

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8086946.stm

I get claig muddled up with alouiseg.

the daily mail is a bit sexist though, isn't it claig?

I'm loving Claig on this thread. I actually agree with some of what she says

Can I recommend a rather lovely, possibly controversial little book at this stage called 'In Defence of Food' by Michael Pollan? His recipe for health is 'Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants' and he sums up how to differentiate 'food' from 'edible food-like substances' in a few easy points. Things like.... 'be wary of any food making a health claim'... 'avoid foods with more than five ingredients'... 'avoid foods with ingredients that you don't recognise or can't pronounce'. And his main test is 'would your grandmother recognise it as food?'... his example being yogurt in a squirty tube. Would she even know it was meant to be edible?

Fun read!

I agree Bugsy. For some reason no-one seems to be trumpeting the dangers of processed food in the same way that the dangers of fat or the need for 5 a day are trumpeted.

I wonder if we need a new public health message which runs along the lines of:

"Look at the ingredients. If you don't know what lots of them are, the item is probably unhealthy."

Xenia, I think there is alot of misinformation in all honesty. Scientists can't even agree - there are huge battles taking place between those who believe it is fat that cause the problems & those who believe it is sugars & carbs. Always worth bearing in mind that money talks & currently there is alot of money being made by flogging cheap, processed foods. Have you ever looked at the list of ingredients on so called "diet" foods - usually a long list of sugars & chemicals to make very cheap, poor quality ingredients palatable. The prices charged for cereals (which in the olden days were fed to cattle to fatten them up) is absolutely outrageous. You are absolutely right, the less processed food the better, the more basic & unmessed around with the ingredients are, the more nutritional value is likely to be in the food. However, there is very little money to be made in this, so funnily enough it is not a message that gets accross.

there was actually a very good and thorough Harvard study recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine that tracked the foods most likely to cause people to gain weight over time:

"4-year weight change was most strongly associated with the intake of potato chips (1.69 lb), potatoes (1.28 lb), sugar-sweetened beverages (1.00 lb), unprocessed red meats (0.95 lb), and processed meats (0.93 lb) and was inversely associated with the intake of vegetables (−0.22 lb), whole grains (−0.37 lb), fruits (−0.49 lb), nuts (−0.57 lb), and yogurt (−0.82 lb) (P≤0.005 for each comparison)

We performed prospective investigations involving three separate cohorts that included 120,877 U.S. women and men who were free of chronic diseases and not obese at baseline, with follow-up periods from 1986 to 2006, 1991 to 2003, and 1986 to 2006. The relationships between changes in lifestyle factors and weight change were evaluated at 4-year intervals, with multivariable adjustments made for age, baseline body-mass index for each period, and all lifestyle factors simultaneously. Cohort-specific and sex-specific results were similar and were pooled with the use of an inverse-variance?weighted meta-analysis."

Most people in the UK have absolutely no idea what are good foods for them. It's very simple. The less processed the food the better. However it's a free country and if like lambs to the slaughter they want to fill themselves with bad food let them and let them swell so the typical British woman;s weight rises from 9 to 18 stone. I am sure that there is a huge link between bad diet and mental health too as your brain chemicals are affected by diet and the rise in depression something a lot of women on mumsnet grapple with is at least in part caused by bad diet too.

It's ridiculous to impose a fat tax on meat and butter.

However in general it is better if we have much less tax and much less state and let people decide things for themselves.

i absolutely support a fat tax but not on meat or butter. IMO it should be on processed foods, or let's keep things really simple - let's start with crisps and fizzy drinks and take it from there.

Yes, I agree, I certainly do all of that, and more, when reading the Guardian.

I didn't listen to the news yesterday. I am shocked that they released Knox. Will have to read up about it.

No newspaper is a Beacon of Truth... they are commercial entities and they angle their stories to please their customers. Retain a healthy cynicism when reading any news story and cross check with other sources rather than taking anything 100% on face value.

Yes, it appears that the Daily Mail is slipping up a few times too often. I fear they have picked up these bad habits from New Labour. I hope they go back to being the Beacon of Truth that they have long been known for.

Good grief!

BTW... if you want your faith in the DM shaken a little further there's a great thread on the News board. Apparently they heard the word 'guilty...' in the Knox Sollecito appeal case, hit the 'go' button publishing a withering attack on the murderous pair, and didn't wait for the sentence to finish '...of slander'. Of course the real verdict was that they were acquitted. The DM doesn't get caught out quite this blatantly normally but they have a bad habit of writing the story they want to tell and ignoring any facts that don't quite fit. So be careful what you believe.

Cogito, I think you are right. On this rare occasion, I think I have been misled by the Daily Mail's journalists.

White bread does appear to have been banned, but I think you are right, that it was for reasons of making more effective use of the grain, rather than for the nation's health.

The nation was also healthier because everybody got enough to eat. This was not the case in the 1930s and before

The nation was healthier by 1947 because it had been on an enforced diet of mostly vegetables supplemented with far smaller amounts of meat, eggs, butter and sugar than it had had access to previously. A diet that many found miserably restrictive and couldn't wait to leave behind. The bread was brown and gritty during the war because grain was short.... not to make the nation healthier.

I think a fat tax is too specific and difficult to monitor and implement as well as open to special pleading.

A more general 'processed food' tax would be better and easily implemented by extending VAT to all food that has been processed in any way. That means only raw unpackaged food would not be taxed. It would help cut down on fat, salt, sugar and packaging.

I would allow pure milk, pure unsweetened yoghurts and pure unsweetened fruit/veg juices and smoothees as the only exception to be included as 'raw' although obviously thay have to be pasteurised and packaged in cartons for sale.

OTOH, after much playing with her diet we've worked out my toddler can't digest wholegrains, so unless I leave her only carbs as potatoes she has to eat some processed foods. (eg white rice and pasta... we make our own bread though so it's easy enough to strip out the unnecessaries from that)

Cogito, I believe the Daily Mail more than I believe you. The Daily Mail article says:

'Though Parliament debated Standard Bread, the government did not act in 1911. During World War II, however, white bread was banned entirely. As a result, the nation was said to be healthier in 1947, after eight years of brown bread and rationing, than it was in 1939.

So, what has all this got to do with today?s bread?
White bread was made legal again after the end of the war, and supermarket shelves are now filled with dozens of different types of bread ? white, brown and black.'

Young children aren't supposed to have skimmed milk (or fat free foods for that matter), but a tax like this punishes the need to give your children the correct food.

Shit foods however should not be so readily avalible (can never get over how much cheaper things like chips, chocolate and fizzy drinks are than foods such as fruit and veg)

Oh ffs claig. Take your DM conspiracy goggles off for a second and use your brain for a change. White bread wasn't 'banned' in the war, it was just more difficult to supply. White bread was the popular stape at the time and wholemeal was seen as inferior. But if your stock of grain is depleted because the supplies keep getting torpedoes, you have to include more of the grain in the loaf (ie. the bran and the husks) or you'll end up with very little bread at all. The 'National Loaf' was the result.

It's no effort. People don't even know what's in their food.

'Why would the 'ruling elite' be bothered to make us sickly with crappy bread etc? Seems like a lot of effort'

Good question. And why would they tell you that GM food is OK and why wouldn't they tell you about aspartame which is in diet drinks that children drink? And why would they tell you, as they used to do, that eggs are not good for you? And why, as the Daily Mail article on bread says, did they ban white bread during the war, but allow it again after the war?

I don't eat bread because I'm intolerant of yeast. I don't find the quick foods I eat which are unprocessed hard. You can open a can of sardines and peel a few carrots in about one minute.

I can't be bothered to talk about the politics of it but there is a huge advantage in packing food with cheap fillers and making the bad materials taste better with harmful additives but people are brown up. If they want to eat bad food and die young then that's up to them. Anyone with half a brain can go on line and look up what is good for you to eat.

I was talking to my 3 sons the other night who do cook from scratch every night and they were putting on their usual sauce mixture on the chicken that was frying and I said let's look at the packet an d the first ingredient (which if it's first means it's the biggest of the content) was sugar. Not that that stopped them eating it and they are much better cooking up their own chicken dish even putting that stuff on than buying read made chicken burgers or something like that. The main thing is most people in the UK eat an appalling diet. Never mind not organic or their apple might have touhced a bit of wax or something, it's that apples are 0.001% of what they eat.

The nuances of it are nothing like as important as what are the basic food sthey eat day in and day out.