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

@Miisty

When I was working I met lots of new mothers who could not cook just ready meals .Slow cookers or a Pressure cooker are brilliant to tenderise cheap cuts

To be honest “cheap cuts” hardly exist anymore. The meat in the supermarket definitely needs tenderising but there’s not a lot between braising steak and roasting joint. Butchers cheap cuts are very expensive. Look at the price of beef shin, lamb shank or pork belly.

I read very widely on this and one strong argument for Japan having no obesity is they don't eat wheat or dairy.

I also read we should be eating whatever our evolutionary systems have got used to having. So northern hemisphere countries will have digestive systems evolved to cope with grains, meat and starchy veg (possibly not in the massive qualities we are used to) and those work alongside long cold winters. Whereas more southerly countries will have got used to largely vegetarian diets as they can grow them all year round. Obviously this goes out the window now we are eating globally.

Vinegar in Chinese food enables the calcium from meat bones to be released as they don’t consume the same amounts of dairy. Younger people in Japan often don’t have sufficient calcium now as they are eating a more western diet and forgoing the wide range of foods the older generations eat.

‘Cheap’ cuts also included offal in the past, liver, kidneys, tripe, brains, trotters, as well as shin, oxtail, breast of lamb, belly pork.

Cheap meat now means intensively farmed chickens, and re-formed meat ‘products’.

Thinking back to the old days of mutton, pearl barley, turnip and suet dumplings is nostalgic claptrap. Our food production system doesn’t work like that now.

It’s like the idea of allotments to make up for the fear of disrupted imports of veg, completely pie-in-the-sky thinking from a vanished world.

Those foods listed above are not what people want to eat now, hence why they’re not stocked and probably go into pet food instead.

To stay stocked up in fruit and veg you have to go to the shop every few days. I absolutely do not have time for this.

So many excuses on here.
Carrots are cheaper than chips and keep for a week, even out of the fridge. Ditto apples.
Tinned tomatoes are veg. I work in a supermarket and sales of pasta sauce jars are incredible at 4 times the price of tinned tomatoes, which is basically what they are.
Pulses (lentils, beans etc) are veg, cheap as and full of protein.

Unfortunately, a lot of people don't have simple SKILLS in cooking. It's really not about time, motivation, storage or money, they are excuses. So it's actually about education. A 7 year old should be able to help chop and grate ingredients. Any 10 year old should be able to make beans on toast. Any 14 year old should be able to follow a recipe to make a pasta-based meal. If they miss those opportunities to learn, at home or at school, they will find it harder to start as adults. But by no means impossible.

People didn’t want to eat those cuts of meat then, there just wasn’t any choice. If you wanted protein you took what there was. I was describing what ‘cheap cuts’ meant, it’s just not a thing in the way it was 60 years ago.

To be fair most of those things including offal are very tasty. Chicken livers are delicious.But generally PP are right that cheap meat now is overproduced or processed.

I still don’t think it’s a lack of cooking skills causing obesity. Everyone can boil vegetables and fry or roast meat in a pan.
It’s just people ( me) have a massive portion with chips followed by a bag of crisps later with a couple of glasses of wine and a bit of chocolate to nibble and eight hours later a couple of slices of toast and a latte at work and a few biscuits snacks after their healthy banana and a couple of sandwiches for lunch and another bag of crisps and a fizzy drink and something for the journey home. And repeat.

Cheap’ cuts also included offal in the past, liver, kidneys, tripe, brains, trotters, as well as shin, oxtail, breast of lamb, belly pork

These are the type of things I was served as a child and probably the reason I have no interest in food and probably go someway towards being vegetarian/vegan

They might have been served years ago, it doesn’t mean people enjoyed them.

I remember stews with pearl barley in and it might have been passable if you didn’t have to look at it (I thought it looked like vomit especially with the bits of carrot) and it wasn’t for the meat that was put in it.
Some stringy stuff that caught in your teeth or some bones that had boiled for about a week

As for liver. I used to get the cane virtually daily
I remember always looking at the school menu and seeing liver and onions or fish and mash and mushy peas or some horrible cake (I hate cake at the best of times) but with custard I knew that day I was definitely going to get the cane for not eating my dinner.

I always find it very funny how many people completely reject the cheap cuts as “gross” and happily dig into sausages and reconstituted meat products...

always find it very funny how many people completely reject the cheap cuts as “gross” and happily dig into sausages and reconstituted meat products...

Odd but not surprising. A sausage is far removed from what it originally was, so chowing down on some liver seems more palatable.

It's not just about cost it's also about having the time and knowledge to cook from scratch, knowing what to do with limited ingredients or leftovers, knowing how to supplement ingredients for others. It also takes effort, far easier to throw a few things from the freezer on a tray and shove them in the oven. If the parents do not cook chances are their DC will not learn to cook either and so the cycle continues.

I absolutely agree with you OP that fresh fruit and veg are expensive, and also do not last a week.

It is still easy to have a healthy diet IF YOU KNOW HOW, e.g. frozen peas/sweetcorn/carrots, tinned tomatoes, etc, but I still don't think they are teaching the basics of producing cheap, healthy meals in school.

When I was at at secondary school in the 90s, home economics was very "design" focussed, e.g. "Design a healthy snack for a teenager, to be sold in the school canteen, design and produce packaging, etc, and I don't think much has changed. What kids need is to learn how to produce nutritionally balanced meals, with relatively cheap ingredients. They need to do this over and over again, so that it comes naturally.

I learnt this from my parents, so it is easy to see why some people never get this.

I do agree that subsidising some fruit and veg would be a good thing. I wouldn't want any form of subsidy that made people more likely to buy cheap meat with poor animal welfare. It seems there is increasing evidence that eating less meat is healthier anyway.

Our family is neither badly off nor vegetarian, and we only eat meat about twice a week for our evening meal. The rest is fish (often not expensive, e.g. pollack fish fingers), different kids of beans, cheese or eggs as the protein source. Again though, I think children should be taught about different ways to add protein healthily.

Although this is mainly up to the parents, I do think schools have a part to play in teaching cooking and old fashioned home economics.
Dd went through the whole of school without a single cookery (or home economics, or any other named similar) lesson.
I was very disappointed, but that's just the way the timetable went, she was never offered the opportunity to chose it.

It should be a compulsory part of the curriculum.

I always find it very funny how many people completely reject the cheap cuts as “gross” and happily dig into sausages and reconstituted meat products

I also think sausages and reconstituted meat products are not very nice. In fact even steak and roast beef has that rotting flesh aroma

Dp cooks things with meat in and it is a choice between making the house smell like an old people’s home with the smell of cabbage even though he hasn’t cooked cabbage or the cooking flesh smell. Both are really unappetising.

Genuine question: are parents more paranoid these days about letting their kids use kettles, pans, knives etc.?

Many schools can’t offer cookery lessons, as they don’t have kitchens. Home economics was on offer when I went to school, way back in the day - a room with counter space and several ovens etc, but my DC’s school didn’t have those facilities.

Secondary schools do offer food science and nutrition as a GCSE. Both my DDs did it. They have to plan meals based on certain dietary requirements, calculate calories and fat etc and cost.

@lilgreen

Secondary schools do offer food science and nutrition as a GCSE. Both my DDs did it. They have to plan meals based on certain dietary requirements, calculate calories and fat etc and cost.

Some secondary schools do, lots do not.

Many are only taught the very short digestion topic in science in year 8 and that is their entire secondary nutrition education.

So it's actually about education
Only on a small scale. Its more about accepting to peel carrots, cut them, put them to boil, have more washing to do, when instead, you can just put some fries in the deep fryer and come back on mn, or other comfort activity.

If we took away people's tablets and phones, they'd find they have plenty of time to take part in healthy activities rather than the quickest.

@SimonJT Really? I thought it was a requirement, certainly should be imo.

[quote lilgreen]@SimonJT Really? I thought it was a requirement, certainly should be imo.[/quote]
It isn’t sadly, lots of secondary schools don’t have any form of catering provision for students. Not only is there a shortage of catering teachers it is a very costly and time consuming subject for schools to run, especially when the ‘bucket’ the subject falls in leads to it having essentially no meaning on league tables.

Such a shame. I encouraged both my DDs to take it. It’s an essential life skill and though we cook at home, they’re both competent cooks now.

For the people who think they would do a better job of being poor than the poor people do...

cookingonabootstrap.com/2020/07/30/the-price-of-potatoes-and-the-value-of-compassion/

There is a much wider structural issue than BOGOFs or junk food. The underlying issue is that we now all spend far less money and time on food than we used to, and less compared with many of our european neighbours. Our housing and childcare costs and working hours by contrast are some of the highest.

If we want people to spend more money and time on food (and decent food absolutely does require more time and money than junk, in the cooking even if not in the buying) then we are going to need to address some of the other things that currently soak up all the time, energy and money.

decent food absolutely does require more time and money than junk, in the cooking even if not in the buying

Depends on how you define 'decent'. Waitrose has lots of 'decent' artisan foods at a hefty price whereas you can buy healthy 'decent' seasonal fruit and veg for bugger all down Asda or Morrisons. When I was poor I was borderline vegetarian with occasional meat treats from the discount shelf. Most of my cooking was of the one pot variety, pasta, baked potatoes etc. I did batch cooking on Sundays so I did not spend too long midweek preparing meals. My diet was not perhaps the most exotic and at times a bit repetitive but it was definitely 'decent' and healthy.

I’ve always cooked meals from raw materials and don’t buy brands as I shop at Aldi. They don’t do bogof.A family of 4( teen DC) and 1 dog and I spend £80pw including a bottle of wine. Lots of veg and tinned pulses(1xdd is vegetarian) , some meat and fish. Once a week I’ll do frozen pizza and oven chips with salad , other days pasta, curry, stir fry, roasted veg with cous cous. Porridge or egg for breakfast, salad or leftovers for lunch etc. Don’t buy chocolate or crisps regularly.