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

Just want to point out that there is a massive problem at the moment with people who cannot feed themselves and their families. Food bank usage is high.
How much is their malnutrition costing the NHS?

As well the suggestions around tackling poverty, education, and poor mental health (all contributing factors in obesity), the government needs to do more to address the issue of food deserts. Approximately 1 million people in the UK live in a food desert. So it's all well and good saying that a banana is 12p in Tesco, Sainsburys, Ocado, Aldi, etc if you actually have access to those places, some people don't. For some people their only food shop is the local convenience store which often have limited stock at inflated prices. Our local convenience store has apples, they are £1 each, and 2kg bags of potatoes which are £3. That's it as far as their fresh fruit and veg section goes. They sell no meat other than bacon, smokeys, and processed sandwich ham. We have access to other supermarkets via car or online ordering, many others don't.

How much would a free £20 box per low income household help with a relatively small start up cost

But what would be the point if you didn’t know how to use the ingredients?

I don’t cook.
I can heat things up and make salads.

Years of disasters and burned down kitchens has made it cheaper if I really don’t go anywhere near the cooker.
Fortunately dc and Dp cook.

The problem I found is if I tried to make say a lasagne from scratch it would cost much more than buying a £1.99 one already made.
Firstly the pre made one would taste better, secondly it would cost less and thirdly it would be quicker.

If we really want to tackle obesity then taking a look at the sugar content and fat content in ready made foods.
This doesn’t mean swapping the sugar for sweetners but just using less sugar.
Or less fats.

Somethings have got so sweet they are inedible.

Even a look at why pre packaged sandwiches have so many calories in them.

£3 meal deals if you choose certain items can have nearly 1000 calories in them and that might just be for lunch.

Fewer people smoke nowadays. We no longer have easy access to valium. People struggling with grinding poverty need something to make life slightly more tolerable. They turn to one of the few remaining available small pleasures. Something to forget, just briefly, the relentless struggle. A cake or a bag of chips or an iced bun.

We all need some kind of treat. When you have almost nothing, when life is a constant struggle to afford the essentials, when you worry all the time about how to house and feed your kids. Day in day out. They can't afford holidays, they can't afford beauty treatments or massages, they can't afford day trips or new clothes. Now they have to live on a diet of porridge, lentils, tinned fish, and cheap apples. Healthy diets and lifestyles for the poor are not quite as they are for the more privileged.

Slow cooking, refrigerating, and freezing all require working equipment which people might not own and they require a steady supply of electricity. Many people in poverty are on key meters.

A veg box would just end up getting resold or dumped. Let’s be honest, many low income families are very happy to eat the shit they eat. They don’t want to eat vegetables. Of course there are some who would utilise vegetables, but many would have no interest at all.

In town on Saturday I was shocked at the amount of fat kids walking about eating crap alongside normal sized adults. The push needs to be in education. Someone needs to be making the parents understand that metabolic disease is caused by an excess or sugar and carbohydrates and if you allow your kids unfettered access to these foods, which act as a drug, they will be fat and unhealthy and will eventually develop diabetes.

Money doesn't affect emotional eating though does it.
A lot of women gain weight post babies - when I was pg with dc1 the local council gyms had crèches were you could leave your baby while you swam or did a class etc. They needed to be subsidised - and then all closed down before dc2 was born. Exercise doesn't have to be expensive (walking, running) but have a high cost in terms of time which a lot of women simply don't get much of to themselves. I'm finally able to get time to myself to exercise as the dc have grown up a bit but I need at least an hour's walk in the evening just to get up to 10,000 steps.
It's interesting obese people are viewed as lazy when it's often when I'm working the hardest that my food intake suffers - just eating convenience food and lots of sugar to keep me going in the middle of a big work project. Also lazy tends to equal not exercising, but its food not exercise that makes the difference to your weight.

At the end of the day, statistics show only 30-50% of cancers are preventable - that shows that at least half can't be avoided, even with healthy lifestyles.

Only??? That's massive!

@KittyFantastico

As well the suggestions around tackling poverty, education, and poor mental health (all contributing factors in obesity), the government needs to do more to address the issue of food deserts. Approximately 1 million people in the UK live in a food desert. So it's all well and good saying that a banana is 12p in Tesco, Sainsburys, Ocado, Aldi, etc if you actually have access to those places, some people don't. For some people their only food shop is the local convenience store which often have limited stock at inflated prices. Our local convenience store has apples, they are £1 each, and 2kg bags of potatoes which are £3. That's it as far as their fresh fruit and veg section goes. They sell no meat other than bacon, smokeys, and processed sandwich ham. We have access to other supermarkets via car or online ordering, many others don't.

There are very few people who do not live within walking distance of a supermarket, there are also very few people who aren’t able to get 50p supermarket deliveries.

You can cook from scratch very quickly too demetedma, especially without meat. Anything with eggs, tinned pulses, stirfrys, all ready quicker than oven chips and you can make a simple pasta sauce using tinned tomatoes or creme friche just as quickly as you can heat up a jar/cook the pasta.

@Lalaok

What I notice whenever I go on holiday is that their supermarkets are completely different to ours. They have more raw ingredients and fresh fruit and vegetables. Whereas we have aisle after aisle of processed junk.

Shops sell what their customers want. We have two Spar shops in our village, one at each end. What they sell is completely different. One has a whole wall for fresh fruit/veg and chiller cabinets with fresh meat, fresh fish, etc., but only a small corner for crisps. The other has a huge wall for crisps, another huge wall for beer, and a tiny rack in the corner for fruit & veg with just a few pre-packed processed meats in a small chiller cabinet. Same owners, same chain. But you see why the difference the moment you step outside the shop and look around. One end has the social housing! Same with takeaways - the fish & chip shop is on the council estate.

When planning new stores, supermarkets etc look at the local demographics and plan their stores accordingly.

Same happens abroad. We go to Cyprus a lot (usually Paphos). There are a few big supermarkets. You can tell which ones are frequently by locals and which are popular with UK holidaymakers and ex-pats! There's on in Paphos which seems to have some kind of link to Tesco - it sells Tesco branded goods, a full range of Kelloggs/Heinz etc - it's all British voices when you walk around, and yes, a huge aisle of crisps and chocolate bars!

Approximately one million people don't live within walking distance of a supermarket and to get a supermarket delivery you need a bank account with a debit card, internet access, and the ability to meet the minimum spend required for delivery.

You may not think there are people in this country who cannot access a supermarket, but there are.

One of the biggest causes of obesity is the ''hidden' sugar in almost everything.

It is not possible to buy any precooked M and S chicken without added sugar.
It is near impossible to find bread without sugar, l found one loaf without sugar from over 15 in Tesco, and of course the cheaper the loaf the more sugar!
Why do savoury ready meals need ANY sugar? or soups? or sauces?

If the Gov did one thing to reduce obesity, it should be to ban sugar and alternative sweeteners from all savoury foods.

Obesity rates have gone up as smoking rates went down.

Perhaps we should encourage people to take up smoking, and give out valium for unavoidable stress (like poverty).

I think they focusing on wrong thing. Obesity is a symptom, they need to address the causes. But that isn't going to happen as it'd cost a lot more than banning adverts and telling people to take up cycling.

We eat a lot more of frozen veg here and the varieties you can get now are much wider.

I'm a big fan of frozen vegetables - I do wonder how people manage when they don't have a decent size of freezer.

We make an effort to eat approx. 10 portions of veg a day of which approx 8 are frozen (we have 2 portions of fruit but that's a mix of fresh and frozen). So, we need roughly 2kg frozen veg a day which overall (with fruit) adds to 15kg a week in the freezer.

We have the space - and it's less wasteful than trying to store and manage fresh produce but it's a big volume and I wonder if some people have practical problems managing fruit and veg between storage and the costs.

Agree that not knowing how to cook is an issue.

It was noticeable during the weeks of shortages earlier this year, that it was pretty much impossible to get tins of tomatoes - but I could always buy fresh tomatoes. Suggesting many people do not understand how to get one from the other.

Making soup is incredibly easy and can use up whatever cheap veg are are available,but you have to have the initial confidence to understand how to prepare vegetables, experiment with flavours etc. My mother couldn't really cook. Fortunately I spent most of my late teens/early twenties living in shared houses and picked it up from housemates. If you don't even know the basics because you've never learnt I think anything more complex than putting chicken nuggets in the oven must be scary.

I don't think vegetables are expensive. Fruit can be.

Tins of vegetables are pretty economical too.

I think the missing link is getting us away from our car-centric society.

And I don't think stopping people banning Mars bars is goingt o stop kids eating those instead of snacking on cauliflower. People don't eat junk food because it's advertised, they eat it because they like the taste of it.

That makes 65million people who do! It may well be an issue for those people who don't live near a supermarket but it really isn't "the" issue.

Food is cheap enough. People generally just need to eat less food if they want to lose weight. 100 calories are 100 calories whatever the food source.

Seasonal fresh fruit and vegetables are cheap. Popular cuts of meat are a luxury product. Unpopular cuts, like chicken thighs, are cheap. (Tbh, it could be argued that all meat is a luxury product; vegetarian diets are perfectly healthy.)

The fact is that most people do not like "plain" boring food. Every "mother and baby" magazine always carries a story about feeding your child organic baby food for 6p - it's always pureed carrots. But, in reality, everyone buys the jar food. It carries on all the way into adulthood. No one really wants to eat seasonal homemade vegetable stew; people want to buy the prepared "nice" food. And, they want to eat a lot of it even if they have a mostly sedentary lifestyle. There is a big difference between working in an office (sitting down all day) and working in a warehouse (on your feet for 12-hour shifts).

I agree with pe in schools needing an overhaul too.
I was overweight as a child so you can imagine secondary school pe. Never picked for team games and everyone groaned when they were stuck with me.
How the hell is that supposed to encourage anyone to exercise? I spent my last 3 years of high school missing pe because it wasnt worth the humiliation. Obviously my waistline grew too.
That was 20 years ago so imagine how many people have been through the same thing since?
Again this wont be a major factor but if theres 2 people like that in every school in every school year, that adds up to a hell of a lot of people actively avoiding exercise.

By all means, publicise the health risks of unhealthy lifestyles, but don't go too far and "victim blame" all those who get cancer through no fault of their own

I'm definitely not advocating victim blaming
But I do think a lot of people don't even know what can be a risk factor. Until the cancer research campaign (which tbf all I saw of was the missing letters poster and Sophie Hagan losing her shit on Twitter) I'd never thought about a link between obesity and cancer. I just knew it was bad for your heart and caused diabetes. I didn't know anything about the research into alcohol and cancer beyond a vague sense that the more you drank the worse it was for you. I didn't stop drinking because of the link but as I said it's been a good motivator especially since DM and DGM had breast cancer which drinking can play a part in.

Sorry I wasn't comparing the price of bananas and sweet "snacks" in big supermarkets but in kiosks and convenience stores.

Haven't read the whole thread...

There was talk of subsidised bicycles...?

Surely the missing element is a more complete cycle path network..?

There's a very strong link with prolonged stress and heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. There's also ongoing research into links between stress and an increased likelihood of developing cancer.