To be annoyed by NHS healthy choices quiz

[Notmycircusnotmyotter]

This seems to be on radio / tv adverts on repeat, featuring a seriously irritating hamster.

what's really annoyed me is the crap advice that you should choosing low fat versions of food (specifically yoghurt) rather than whole foods and full fat versions. AIBU to think this is outdated bad advice?

I've planned my demise if I become aware of things starting to go off kilter. H and the a/kids know, they don't like it but accept it's my choice. Having worked with dementia patients I swore I would never go down that road.

I am very aware of that. I reached a healthy weight 11 years ago now, and I still get people telling me with glee that I will pile it back on soon. I won’t, as I can’t fall face first in to Greggs anymore due to the coeliac diagnosis for one!

I will occasionally have a bit of chocolate if one of my kids pass it to me, like over Christmas. (The difference is, I can just have one celebration now and that’s it for months, I used to buy 10 boxes to eat myself over the Christmas period, id polish off one a day).

I have a family member who practically jumps up and down if they see me eat a hero - “you are off your diet!! I told you!” It’s the most ridiculous thing to witness.

The difference was, I didn’t go on a diet. I changed everything. On my own and for myself.

And I don’t obsess over what I eat. I couldn’t tell you how much protein or fibre I eat in a day - I just eat single ingredient, natural food, and cook everything from scratch (well, dh does, he’s the cook!)

And again, I’m not saying it’s as simple as swapping to full fat. I’m saying the advice is flawed.

Low fat is total bullshit. People just eat too much shite.
Eat small amounts of healthy food... so simple.

I think I scored 8 out of 10 on the quiz a month or two ago. Then at my initial post-40 years old checkup I learnt I had high bad cholesterol (as well as high good cholesterol) and my weight had also shot up. I think the weight gain was partly due to starting HRT a few months ago as I know I was 5kg lighter beforehand. I'd been a couple of kg overweight since my pregnancy, but hadn't realised it had gone up again recently.
The cholesterol result and realising that I now nearly qualified as obese was my wakeup call. For the past three weeks I've been eating less sugar, cereal and biscuits, making myself feel hungry for hours at a time, snacking on healthy stuff and eating smaller, healthier meals. I never thought I'd be able to stick with it but I have and have lost almost 2kg. The downside is I feel anxious and on edge due to raised cortisol associated with the ketosis. I read that this can lessen after the first three weeks, fingers crossed. I just need to keep going for another couple of months and then comes the maintenance phase!!

I think if they want people to be healthier they should put honest amounts of calories burned on things. Something like 'one tablespoon of this equals half an hour of walking fast' or 'three of these biscuits equal an hour's run'.

Too many people eat too much and then convince themselves that they 'work it off' because they always take the stairs at work. I was reading a women's magazine which was telling me that an hour of running would burn 500 calories. I wish!

And I know that it's only ever going to be an average, and that some people will burn more calories than others doing the same thing, but surely just indicating how MUCH work you have to do to offset foods might be a start?

I don't think the people that test is aimed at are eating ANY Greek yogurt, full fat or otherwise

I don’t want to derail this thread but, can I ask why you have to have the blood test? Is it to check that you are absorbing nutrients or is it because you might be lacking them due to
the gluten free diet?

I have a gluten allergy and follow a strict gluten free diet (even down to no malt vinegar etc) but have not been required to have blood tests, hence the question.

I’m overweight due to medication for depression and anxiety and being hospitalised in a psychiatric ward this time last year. The food they give you there is awful, very beige and school dinner like. Yes, it can help eg to have food with your medication before you go to bed to help you sleep.

After a few weeks I stopped eating breakfast and my DM came in every day with a healthy salad for my lunch with walnuts, feta cheese and hard boiled eggs. She also brought in tubs of fruit salad and breadsticks with Philadelphia cheese as snacks. I stopped eating the dinners partly because I didn’t like them but once after eating a Lebanese lentil dhal style meal I was violently sick whether this was coincidence or not I don’t know. For dinner I ordered in guacamole, salsa and Ritz biscuits along with Pringles and the odd chocolate bar. I lost about a stone whilst doing this. Minimal exercise too apart from
general walking around.

Basically still a lot of people are uneducated about diet and exercise.

A close friend of mine who’s a size 18 recently started doing Pilates every day for an hour or more, she also has a one to one session with her Pilates teacher once a week. She tracks her food on the WW app but that’s as far as it goes no meetings. She eats boiled eggs a lot and has switched to more vegetables and salads. She did indulge over Christmas and November as it was her mother’s 90th birthday and there were celebrations around this. She’s lost 9lb so far and fitted into her old jeans and you can tell the toning and weight loss from how she looks.

Yeah massively outdated.

The NHS Eatwell Plate is the same - giving people the excuse to eat tons of carbs and sugar. Ok the NHS doesn’t suggest that specifically, but people think “brown bread” is good for you and some chocolate is ok - we should be encouraging more whole foods, full fat healthy fats, less salt and as little as humanly possible refined sugar.

Fat makes you full, sugar makes you fat!!!

That’s amazing @Gonnagetgoingreturnsagain and how lovely of your DM 💐

I hope your health is still going well!

I don’t have to have them, you can opt out. But I chose to stay in the system.

Coeliacs can have trouble absorbing vitamins. So they are all checked.

Along with full blood count and liver tests as once you have an autoimmune condition, you are more susceptible to others developing.

If I stay in the system, they will also refer me for bone density scans. I had one when I was diagnosed at 40 and my bone density was excellent, they said they would probably want me to have another at 50.

Just to add - I know many coeliacs who are like “eh, what blood tests?” But I wasn’t diagnosed by the NHS (I had symptoms for years but was just fobbed off). It was by a private gastroenterologist who then referred me to an NHS dietician for ongoing bloods as my health insurance won’t cover those. So I’m not sure if that makes a difference.

I think this argument infantilises a lot of people with bad diets. There's a lot of information out there, schools teach food tech, there have been public health adverts aimed at kids for years. Cost / time I get but that's often a question of priorities rather than forced poor eating.

What on earth is bad food environment?

How much cereal etc are you still eating? Are you testing your urine for ketones? I didn’t think it was possible to bring on ketosis eating any sort of refined carbohydrate?

Well that’s the advice that the NHS guides are currently built upon which is to reduce saturated fat by choosing low fat (it does specify low sugar too).

Its advice pinned at overweight people - people who likely eat way too much fat not healthy weight people who can benefit from whole fat.

And at least they’re trying to do something with a public campaign. Nobody in the UK seems to want to listen considering the obesity levels.

Because that’s the advice dietitians are taught to peddle… they’re not allowed to just go off piste and start preaching ideas that aren’t on the NHS line. That’s how you get reported for not working in your clinical scope. She’s giving you the advice she has to give you.

Yeah, and we pushed low fat low calorie for at least 30yrs and we're fatter than ever.

Only way i lose weight is low sugar/carb and high protein/fat.

Also to clarify… when dietitians say ‘cereals’ they mean wheat, rice, corn, sorghum, quinoa… not breakfast cereal.

Yes, I do realise that.

Doesn’t mean I find it any less maddening.

I've done the quiz and it told me to swap to low-fat cheese. Ewww. I buy it from the farmer directly. I'm not swapping for some nasty UPF rubber.

The Eatwell guide has removed processed food and chocolate from the plate all together and says ‘eat as little as possible’, it recommends whole grain, high fibre starchy carbs as just over 1/3rd of the diet to be completed with 1/3rd vegetables and fruit and the rest lean meats, fish, eggs, legumes, low fat and low sugar dairy and a small amount of oils/fats.

I can’t see anything wrong with that advice for a healthy population.

I'm eating a small bowl of shreddies about every week. It's intermittent ketosis maybe as I do eat some bread, potatoes etc. I'm not totally clued up on it so just wikipedia'd it: "occurs during states of increased fatty acid oxidation such as fasting, carbohydrate restriction, or prolonged exercise". I definitely feel less anxious after breakfast ("breaking my fast")!

If you don't know what a 'bad food environment' is then please visit a Food Warehouse.

One opened in my town recently and I visited. There were aisles and aisles of stuff that I would never eat because it is just a box of chemicals and not food.

I had to buy sanitary towels to avoid a parking fine...

It hasn’t said to do that… lots of reduced fat cheese is just made with some of the fat skimmed out and some extra casein (that’s cheese proteins) added in. It’s still just milk if you buy the correct ones. Don’t be so dramatic.

If you’re eating more than 50g of CHO (carbohydrate - the macro not the food group) a day then you will not be entering ketosis.

Ah right, thanks, I wonder what it is that's making me feel tense. Low blood sugar maybe...