Government tackling obesity missing a key element

[HeeeeyDuggee]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-53546151

Government have announced measures to tackle obesity

AIBU to think that although it’s all well and good banning buy 1 get 1 free and advertising before 21:00 what they really need to do is make fresh fruit and vegetables and good quality meat cheaper for people to buy.

It may be a regional thing but buying enough veg for the week here costs a fortune and it goes off within days. Where as you can buy a massive packet nuggets and chips for much less.

Pre covid it was bad enough for lots of families but given the ramifications on jobs and the economy I think lots more families will struggle to afford decent healthy food.

Ps not a fat persons bashing thread I myself am over weight

The sad truth for a lot of overweight families is that they are on low incomes and can't afford "good" food so go for the chips/chicken nuggets option because that fills them up, the kids like it and is cheap.

So that might explain why the diet is unhealthy, but why does that diet lead to obesity? Is it not as simple as calories in - calories out, do "junk" calories count double or something?

I think supermarkets should take some of the blame. It is hard to buy seasonal when they always have the same stock available every week (and the prices don't seem to change with seasonality either).

They also seem to have a very limited range of produce - the bigger stores just have more of the same stuff. Most people don't have the time to trawl independent shops or markets to find different types of produce (which are often incredibly expensive).

And yes - the basic cooking skills - I am a reasonably good cook, fairly unadventurous, I learnt from my mum. However, I'm not really sure what cuts of meat are meant to be slow cooked, I have no idea about grains and pulses, vegetarian food is a mystery. Supermarkets could do a lot to help with this type of information placed by the actual products. Yes I could search through recipes books or online, but I haven't got the time to do that, and then discover the meal I need in 30 minutes actually takes 4 hours to cook.

I found i put on more weight working full time even though i was living off salads I didn't have the time to exercise i was up dressed ready kids in childcare off to work (too far away to walk) work all day out of work back to childminder grab kids tea bed prep for the next day! I was exhausted and the pounds went on!

Aldi and Lidl do really cheap fruit and veg. Just meal plan around their 'super 6' type deals. Tesco and other supermarkets have copied this strategy. I can't say about the rest of the UK but when I lived in London, there were amazing food markets all over where fruit and veg, especially in season produce, was amazing value. 4 bundles of asparagus or cobs of corn for £1, etc.

Meat is certainly more expensive but there are ways of making it affordable. Buying a whole chicken and making a number of meals from it. Or carefully purchasing deals, buying a whole pork steak or buying frozen lamb and using them for a variety of meals, all makes it very affordable.

It's only when people insist on buying the same meat cuts and range of fruit and vegetables, regardless of what is in season or what they cost that it gets expensive.

There are plenty of people on low income who have turned to healthier food but it takes a switch in mentality.
It’s hard to change from what you’ve been used to. Especially if you don’t know you need to change.
Then there is an effort to it as well. I don’t think it’s more expensive to eat healthier as frozen veg, tinned tomatoes and pulses don’t cost much at all and there are always fruit and veg on offer. Sometimes for 50p in some supermarkets.
But it is a waste of money if the kids refuse to eat it and it ends up in the bin.

I think there are a few problems with this new approach. The first one, how many of us watch regular tv? I know my grandchildren don't. They've grown up with watching Netflix and Amazon, no adverts. If they happen to put regular tv on, it soon goes off because of the annoying toy adverts.
Secondly, a surprising amount of the 'target' population haven't even tried to cook from scratch. It's 'too hard' and 'the kids don't like it' without even trying it. I worked in school kitchens for years, over time staple foods were seen as suspicious - even Yorkshire Puds. When Jamie's campaign was successful, nearly all the meals ended up in the bin, the children wouldn't eat them. The vast majority of pupils were on free meals, we knew this would be the only hot food they'd be given. In the end, menus had to be tweaked to encourage them to just try.

I'm really hoping the lockdown has resulted in more families cooking meals from scratch.

Well it’s a start. I find it really annoying how they place the sweets at checkouts.

I’m really glad they’ve started selling imperfect fruit and veg too it’s much more affordable for people.

Whilst I agree on some level that some healthy food is expensive sometimes people are spending a fortune on takeaways as well! Fast junk food is so readily available at the moment.

And this scheme coupled with the government’s eat out to help out I find a bit contradictory.

Supermarkets could do a lot to help with this type of information placed by the actual products. Yes I could search through recipes books or online, but I haven't got the time to do that, and then discover the meal I need in 30 minutes actually takes 4 hours to cook.

Plan ahead. It takes minutes to find all that info. And you need to find it couple of times, then you remember. Supermarkets are not here to educate people who cannot be arsed to do it themselves

It's a myth that fruit and veg are expensive or that good quality meat is out of reach.

If you switch to only buying "ingredients" rather than anything that comes in a packet, watch your shopping bills plummet.

Move to a vegan, home cooked diet or a mostly plant based diet with small amounts of meat occasionally and you can feed a family well and even organically for around £50 per week. When I did Veganuary (which I actually kept up until the start of lockdown when shopping temporarily got complicated!) I got our shop for 4 adults down to £45 pw.

It's not basic food stuffs that make your supermarket shop expensive.

Access to decent exercise is also an issue I’ve found.

What's 'decent exercise'? Running or fast walking can be done pretty much anywhere and with no more equipment than a pair of trainers.

Dried beans and pulses are cheap and highly nutritious. Whole grains/rice. Frozen veg very good too. Eat less meat and cheaper cuts. Chicken legs instead of breast. Eat less processed bread & cake/ biscuits. More porridge with milk and a bit of sugar/ honey/jam for breakfast. The cheapest processed food is cheap for a reason. Not worth buying.

Is it not as simple as calories in - calories out, do "junk" calories count double or something?

Calories in, calories out is a very, very blunt tool. Our bodies do react differently to different types of food. People often equate foods full of processed sugar with eating fruit which is naturally high in fructose. But they don't compare as fruit is full of water and fibre, (along with many other nutrients) and eating more fruit can actually aid weight loss as it keeps your digestive system moving. Eating berries even keeps your blood sugar levels healthy despite berries being full of fructose. So the nutritional make-up of food is every bit as important as it's calorie content.

I think there is nothing wrong with chips and chicken nuggets if you serve it with less chips and nuggets than you usually would have and a bigger portion of vegetables once or twice per week.

All getting rid of BOGOF is going to do is make stuff more expensive and push more people onto the junk food.

I shop twice per week at Lidl and spend about £30 each time and get everything. (Food, basic toiletries, cleaning and washing stuff for 4 adults)
I go twice per week because my fridge isn’t that big and the fruit and veg doesn’t last.

If you want to tackle the obesity crisis then I think looking at alcohol consumption might help.

I was buying a soft drink in the local Tesco’s
It was placed near to some beers and other alcoholic drinks in the fridge section. I did a double take on the price. The alcohol worked out cheaper to buy than the soft drink.

Obesity for a lot is calories in v calories out but for a lot of people it can be so much more complex.

I am obese. I have also gone through the menopause. I don’t think I eat that much. My issue is sleep. If I sleep 8hours + I can lose 4lbs over night and I feel fantastic.
Usually though I sleep 4-5 hours and feel groggy all day. I would love sleeping pills, even just one night per week to knock me out and stop my brain from going into overdrive if I wake during the night.

It doesn’t seem to matter what I eat as I can track my weight according to how much sleep I have had

It's always baffled me that it's cheaper to buy a Mars bar than a banana or an apple! I think there should be a campaign to promote eating less meat; once or twice a week is plenty if you otherwise eat a balanced diet that includes lots of pulses, eggs and nuts. I would also introduce daily PE lessons and put double yellow lines on the roads around schools with exemptions only for residents and blue badge holders.

Frozen fruit and veg packs could be sold as buy one get one free, and they often have more nutrients as they haven’t been sitting around. Also people could just use what they want without waste of the odd half of something going off in the fridge.

I agree not everyone has learned the skills of cooking and making the most of leftovers, and for some I do agree that isn’t their fault. If the government want to address obesity, they need to look at the school curriculum and teach cookery properly.

It's all completely pointless. Fat people know they are fat. They also know how to lose weight.
I weigh 18 stone, size 24 clothes and I absolutely hate it and I am completely ashamed of myself. Do you know what I do when I feel ashamed of myself???. I eat more!!!
It doesn't make any sense. It's like an addiction.
I know what foods I should be buying and eating but I don't.
I know what exercises I should be doing, but I don't.

Taking offers away, and banning adverts etc will make zero difference.

I also think we need to separate food poverty obesity from middle class obesity. They are two very different issues.

Lots of comfortably off overweight people where I am who know all about good food choices, just don’t make them.

Fruit and veg really are not expensive if you buy in season or frozen. People need to take responsibility for their health and that of their children, the government can't do everything.

Veg is already cheap. Frozen is even cheaper.

I think the issue is that there is a skills desert. You can make delicious, filling, cheap meals for pennies but it does require some cooking skills and many people don’t have them (usually through no fault of their own). Or, they don’t have time to prepare food from scratch because they work full time and have childcare responsibilities.

Meat is always going to be expensive, and even more so for ‘better quality’. Since we all need to eat less meat anyway, the government could do worse than promote an educational campaign on how to cook healthy vegetarian and vegan meals from scratch and encourage people to have meat as an occasional treat rather than a daily occurrence.

Better education on cooking from scratch would also help tackle the issue of hidden sugar. There are 30g of sugar in a family size jar of dolmio bolognese sauce, but barely any in a marinara sauce made fresh. There is more sugar in ketchup than in Belgian chocolate. This information is on the labels, but how many people check labels for everything they buy when their primary focus is on getting a convenient and tasty meal the whole family will eat?

I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to make meat and vegetables cheaper. They are already very very cheap, and the quality/ animal welfare does suffer when people don’t care about quality just price.
Teach people how to eat and how to cook proper food, put our food standards up and chicken nuggets made from mécanicly removed meat and other unhealthy crap would disappear from our shelves.
Healthier people, better environment

My DP is 50 years old, 5ft 11in & weighs 20 stone. He has Type 2 diabetes. I am 41 years old, 5 ft 2in & weigh 10 stone. DP's biggest problem is alcohol. He drinks 10 -14 units most days on an empty stomach then overeats. I think Alcohol is a big driver of unhealthy diets & weight. I drink 1 bottle of wine over the weekend.
The diabetes nurse at the surgery is overweight, the doctor who diagnosed full diabetes earlier in the year was overweight. It has become too normalised in society. I fully accept that there are people with medical issues that cause excess weight.

This problem cannot be solved by banning adverts or printing calories on labels.

@TooGood2BeTrue

It's always baffled me that it's cheaper to buy a Mars bar than a banana or an apple! I think there should be a campaign to promote eating less meat; once or twice a week is plenty if you otherwise eat a balanced diet that includes lots of pulses, eggs and nuts. I would also introduce daily PE lessons and put double yellow lines on the roads around schools with exemptions only for residents and blue badge holders.

A banana from sainsburys is 12p

Vegetables in the UK are not expensive! You can buy 6 tomatoes for 79p, a huge bag of potatoes for just over a pound, lettuce for less than a pound, cucumbers for 50p, 3 peppers for about a pound, 1kg bag of onions also for a pound and a tub of mushrooms for less than a pound.

I can keep going on and on, but you can see my point. What more can a person want? Do you want free vegetables and someone to wash and prepare them for you?

Try living in Canada where a 680g of mushrooms costs $6.80.

When my Canadian mom visited me in the UK and we went Tesco shopping, she screamed my name from across the store and came running with peppers she found to be priced at 93p. In Canada, the poor lady pays $5.99 for a few peppers.

The world is full of people who think vegetables are expensive but see junk food and alcohol as justifiable purchases regardless of the cost.

IMO opinion the bigger issues is lack of education around healthy diet and cooking. Lots of people under a certain age just didn’t get any education in school around cooking/diet/home economics whatever you want to call it and it isn’t a given that their parents taught them these skills at home. I lived in a house share with a girl who lived on packet pasta and ready meals for a good few months as she has moved straight out of home where her mum did everything for her and she just didn’t have any basic cooking skills!
Fruit and veg can be expensive but it can also be very affordable if you eat seasonally and utilise frozen and tinned-but if you haven’t been taught this how are you to know? As PP have said there are so many now living on the breadline a cheap cut of meat is one thing but the electricity for 6-8hours in the slow cooker is something else.
We have developed a society that is convenience driven and we want everything quickly with little effort with often the added pressure of long working hours etc. Few people have time to shop around to get the cheapest seasonal foods it’s much easier to do a bulk buy at the supermarket where we are faced with convenience even in the fruit and veg aisle. Getting in from a long days work when you can throw a cheap ready meal in the microwave instead of cooking one from scratch is a win for many people. You are not being unreasonable but I think the obesity issue is far bigger than expensive fruit and veg it’s things like changing education, lifestyle, and poverty that will really impact-it doesn’t matter how cheap you make ingredients if you don’t know how to cook them or have the facilities to do it.