To think peoples lives are crap enough without needing the government to interfere with Meal Deals

[Jeansmeansheinz]

FFS just let people have the pleasure of a Meal Deal. I really don't need the Government telling me what I can and can't eat.

Exactly. The government knows exactly what it's doing when it weaponises outrage against certain groups.

All these MPs pretending to care about the calorie content of a tuna sandwich, while they're all stuffing their faces in fancy restaurants where the average meal is 50% butter, and making use of HoP heavily subsidised food and booze (which WE pay for!). I've eaten in the HoP restaurant before and it's not exactly lentils and lettuce.

It's a joke really, they want to stop meal deals, yet we have so many fast food chains, savoury and sweet. Pretty sure they are more the issue.

Deliveroo is bloody nightmare. During COVID I got a serious takeaway habit. I put on a lot of weight.

Before COVID I was a scratch cook but the convenience was great.

What is a little scary was just how quickly my healthy cooking self disappeared. I had to drop all this stuff like crap sandwiches and takeaway to get rid of the weight gain. I found myself very tired and thirsty.

That's the thing to re-engineering society food wise, it basically needs a whole redesigning of various foods and improvements in food technology so that all and anything that's not good for humans is deleted from the food chain.

If you look globally there doesn't appear to be any correlation between lower incomes, longer working hours and higher obesity rates. If anything they appear to be inversely correlated, so there's no evidence of any causality between these factors?

I'm very overweight.......I dont eat meal deals, in fact I eat pretty healthily.

But my poor mental health has lead to an extremely sedentary life, I leave my house to go to work 25 hours a week, other than that I just exist.

And have I had any luck getting support for my mental health ?? Have I shite.

There is much more to weight issues than poor food choices, the sooner we all realise that and start treating the person not the cause the better.

It’s not just about calories though - an average bag of crisps has 7grams of fat, 16g in a sandwich.

Do people also realise the amount of sugars and calories are in alcohol ?

But it isn't happening for all the reasons people have mentioned above. I teach my daughter because I know how to and we have time and resource.

Problem is it's a really narrow "fix".

Obesity isn't just "choosing the wrong food" for some it's a genuine mental health issue around food.

Sometimes it's about finances.

Wales is massively economically deprived. 27% of children in Wales live in relative income poverty. As many of us now, processed food is just cheaper, but rather than make healthier food and healthy options cheaper, they are now going to make the cheap unhealthy food more expensive.

So basically, if you are poor you now get "no food."

I mean I suppose that's one way to solve the obesity problem, starve them 🤦🏻‍♀️

Welsh Government logic at its finest.

Actually @Swansandcustard you are wrong about the price of healthy ingredients in Asia. They are not waaay cheaper than here, compared to salaries.

Anyway, this meal deal restriction won't help, because people will just go next door and buy something even unhealthier. What the UK needs is a complete revamping of food culture, but that is such a gigantic endeavour that it won't happen. Jamie tried and got only abuse for it.

It's just making life more miserable.
We buy a meal deal because it's easier than cooking when rushing to work or out and about (who wants to carry a packed lunch shopping). We won't stop buying them, it'll just cost us more and who gets that money? It's the same as sugar tax, its provable that it doesn't change habits. People who wanted sugary versions of drinks will just pay the extra and probably don't even think about it.

YY @flurbubbly

And before people start talking about just cooking lunch the night before, it's not really practical or pleasant to have to cart a packed lunch around on public transport all day then eat something that's been squished at the bottom of your bag for hours

Or gone off in the heat because this shithole of a third world country doesnt believe in air conditioning on public transport and offices factories etc.

I would ban supermarkets from selling junk food and alcohol.

Thedinosaur I agree about the finances, when we were very badly off a while back we really struggled to provide fruit and veg and bulked out on cheap, carby fillers. Pasta for example I'd have previously had a small portion and a side of salad. The salad wasn't affordable anymore so it became a double portion of pasta instead. Often with one of those 30p garlic breads chucked on top.

Really? Both of these are fine in moderation.

There's so much moralising on this thread about the weak-willed fat people gobbling up meal deals and other unhealthy foods. If only they would take the time to prepare some lentils and just EDUCATE themselves, right?

You can buy a lasagne for 99p in the supermarket. Good luck making one for anywhere near to that price. Certainly home-made will taste better, but if you're short on money - and time - then being fed is better than not.

The government can't raise the prices of food it considers to be bad, without taking opposite steps to make health, convenient food readily available - and cheap.

With two parents out at work, there's often scant time to cook a decent meal every night for lots of families. Not everyone has freezer room to batch cook - that's assuming they've got the money to buy in bulk. We've just gone through a winter where people were too scared to switch their heating on and sat there, shivering, during icy temperatures. But suddenly now we're not worrying about the cost of using fuel to do all this batch cooking and prep? That's without even solving the issue of time....

As some PP have said - this is performative. It will get lots of people clapping their hands and nodding sagely about the bad fat people who now have to eat more healthily.

The answer is not more stick, but more carrot - quite literally. Why not put healthier choices in the meal deals? Yoghurts, fruit, etc. It's hard to pick up convenience food that's also healthy. Fruit and veg, meat and fish - they're all staples but really expensive. It's mind-blowing that we've reached a stage of food poverty where eating meat or fish is now considered a luxury.

Our lifestyles are not the same as they were in the 1950s so it's a daft comparison. Changing this tiny thing in isolation is utterly pointless unless the government are committed to making a raft of other changes at the same time encompassing everything from better food and health education in schools which is practical and actually meaningful, right through to forcing supermarkets to sell fruit, veg, meat, fish and other staples much more cheaply. Oh, and they can also reduce the amount we're charge for energy - I get that there has been problems with the supply of energy but we're one of the few countries where customers were slapped with high costs.

Changing meal deals is just a way for the government to get ass pats without actually pissing off the corporations who are churning out the unhealthy stuff.

But then your relying on the public to have moderation

Literally no one thinks something becomes UPF if you cook it at home but add a lot of water, salt or fenugreek
Mono- and diacetyl tartaric esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids, on the other hand is not considered an ingredient anywhere yet makes its way into Sainsbury’s BLT. Not sure people are adding sugar to homemade BLTs either, nor 1/3 of their daily salt allowance.

It's even more fine to have no junk food and no alcohol.

I wouldn't ban them entirely. Just have separate shops for junk food and alcohol only to be sold in government controlled off-licenses.

I may allow low ABV beer and wine to be sold in supermarkets.

All this 'I'm so tired I have no time to cook healthy meals'. We hear it all the time on here.

Maybe it's the other way round: people are tired BECAUSE they eat crap food. If you eat proper (non UPF) food, you have way more energy.

Rishi, If you really want to help to get the population slimmer, get Joe Wickes on the telly every night instead of blooming bake off.

You do have more energy if you eat more healthily. But if you don't have the time in the first place, then what do you do? If you don't physically have the time - and maybe you don't have the resources readily available either - then it's not as simple as just saying "eat more healthily and you won't be tired."

Lots of people are both financially poor and time-poor. That is a really difficult situation to be in.

And "Asia" isn't a monolith.

A lot of Westerners have a very rose-tinted (and pretty colonialist) idea of "Asia" as being full of cheery impoverished people living off the land and hawking their humble trade by the roadside, untouched by the evils of Western consumerism.

I doubt those people are Asian or have ever lived in Asia.

It's the whole noble savage myth with new clothes. Giving "Barbie Saviour" vibes (google it if you don't know what that is).

Some countries definitely have amazing and cheap, high quality ingredients. But there are also plenty of non-Western/developing countries that really struggle a lot, or that rely strongly on imports. There are remote places where prices are just insanely high because everything is imported. Places where nothing grows. Places where agriculture has collapsed because of climate change. Places where people have to eat shit cheap food because most of the stuff they grow is shipped abroad. Global agricultural markets and access to food/nutrition is an extremely complex issue with many different intersecting factors surrounding socioeconomics, culture, all sorts of things.

Same here! Don’t think I’ve ever had a meal deal… I avoid all prepackaged sandwiches/wraps/pasta because they are universally gross.

Now if they ban jam doughnuts I might be in with a chance!