to be fed up with the Government telling me what to eat?

[meltedmarsbars]

Its never-ending, and now school have sent my dc's home with charts to fill in for "healthy eating" targets and "move more" targets, to record for a MONTH how they get on!

Its intrusive and patronising!

How do I tell them to bog off?

Wait... on food tastes you can change them. Why aren't I allowd to get a lot of pleasure out of grilled salmon for example which I have for 4 lunches a week? Why shoudl I have to want to cover it in sauces. I hate tomatoe sauces and it tastes delicious plain.

There's isn't some book of God which says you have bad taste in food if you don't like rich sauces or you like plain meat without curry powder on it. I love food . Also people get used to things and think I could never like X (such as tap water or roast chicken over mars bars) but it's just a matter of habit and custom and you can easily change over time .

Also what's wrong with Tesco? You lot must be very snobby. I know people who have worked in factories where the same goods are giong to the value and non value lines and to XYZ posh shop and ABC basic one. Not all lines but some.

And may be the reason I have so much money is because I don't waste it being conned by wrong science.

ROFL xenia

Tin of tuna
Brown rice
A raw carrot

Is not the same as a roast chicken dinner or a piece of poached/grilled salmon by any stretch of the imagination!

I happily drink tap water and would rather have some roast chicken than a mars bar any day of the week, but I'm afraid you will never convince me that a raw carrot and some brown rice is an exciting lunch experience.

As for why you have lots of money - i thought it was because you were very good at a highly paid job,and you loved working and worked very hard? The idea that in fact it is because you go out of your way to source cheaper cruelty-max eggs will be of keen interest to some of the less well heeled members of MN i expect.

Well there you go, Xenia. Grilled salmon is also a gorgeous lunch to me too, even without much else because it's tasty on its own. Very different from tinned tuna though! But 4 days a week? As lovely as it is, I wouldn't want it every other day. And more to the point - we're talking about a healthy, varied diet, surely? If you're sticking to the same food type nearly every lunch then there's not much variation in terms of nutritional intake, surely?

Also interested in idea about eating more unprocessed food from basic ingredients (great idea) and getting food made in factories ie ready meals etc.

You can get better quality, better tasting basic ingredients if you look around. Plus I prefer to spend my money in a shop which benefits its employees as a direct result - but then that's my personal choice. I am happy to pay a bit more for that and for meat which I believe has been reared in a less intensive manner.

Agree with riven re antibiotics it's scary. All the doctors exhorting us to finish courses of antibiotics with dire warnings of disease resistance - and here they are pumping anitbiotics into massive numbers of animals as a preventative measure

Whilst I disagree with the approach gov/schools are taking on healthy eating at the moment Nigelella has reminded us of the reason they are so desperate to do something. I would be interested to know why they haven't tried going back to the days of teaching proper cookery lessons in school. Instead of eating processed expensive food kids could learn how to cook proper healthy meals, instead of being told that certain foods are bad for them but not being taught what a proper meal looks like. I can't remember what it was called but Jamie Oliver did a series recently about teaching people how to cook proper meals, and he didn't have as much success as he expected because people were already stuck in their ways. Instead of leaving it until people are making their kids obese why are kids themselves being taught how to cook properly at school?

The problem with Tesco is that it has rows and rows and rows of stuff I don't want.

Battery farming of chickens requires more oil and more antibiotics than the alternatives.

Free range generally delivers better margins for the producers.

Of course without intensive farming we won't be able to feed everyone.

Souls don't exist.

I suppose the issue on the thread is the nanny state and infringement of people's privacy rights by these food diaries. But perhaps as long as there have been schools children have gone in and said things about their families their parents would rather they did not say.

And we do have this problem of over half of people over weight which I think in part is people eating unbalanced diets. I really think my 4 lunches a week of grilled salmon is not going to kill me more than the average burger and chips or pack of chocolate biscuits for lunch routine of so many other people. We used to lvie on fish. It's arguably homo sapiens' natural diet - you lived by the sea and helped yourself to fish and like most people who work full time you get busy so if you find food that works for you and takes little time to cook and makes you feel good I don't think it matters if you stick to it for just over half the week.

I think most people would be better off getting their food back to basics and unprocessed.

Agree there I am a creature of habit too. Doesn't matter if you have the same for lunch every day if you are having a different supper.

The overweight problem - it's really come about because of cars hasn't it? I watched that series about diet through the ages with sue perkins - supersize me? Anyway they dressed up in 70s gear and were woofing down angel delight and stuff. they reckoned that the average person consumed a huge amount of calories more than they do now - 1000 more or something. But that everyone was whippet thin as there were hardly any cars, people had to walk to the bus/tube/shops etc and as a result people just burnt off that many more calories from their standard daily life.

PLus I suppose the telly was shite and you didn't have computers so people did stuff instead of being glued to the sofa. And more manual jobs - even in an office job you would have had to physically get up and open a filing cabinet and hunt through it and carry the papers back to your desk and so on. It all adds up.

I really believe that the problem isn't food, it's exercise. It is so easy these days to live a normal life, earning money and looking after kids etc while barely moving except from sofa to car to office chair and back.

It's a mixture of factors but certainly people move much less. In fact the thin don't necessarily go to the gym but they are just naturally up and down more, even just drumming their fingers on the desk apparently whilst the fat comotose hardly rise from the chair.

I think the types of foods matter too. If you have stable 3 meals a day of basic non processed foods you stay fuller for logner. If in stead you eat biscuits and hike your blood sugar levels up and down you eat more. If I remember our 1970s meals we had a cooked breakfast - all that protein makes you feel good and you stay full; there were no snack machines all over - people didn't eat until the next meal; then a school lunch cooked or at home and plenty of children walked 30 mins home from primary school ate lunch at home and walked back; my mother walked the baby in a pram to our school collected us for lunch and walked us back and then did the same walk morning and evening to -0 that'sd six such journeys (not surprising she took her driving test and got a little mini car in the 1960s mind you)....

Then you had your cooked dinner and yes you might have angel delight after it but the basic dinner was your meat, peas and potatoes which is not too bad a meal for you.

So the real problem is that our lives have become too convenient, and that human nature beign what it is many/most people don't have the oomph to fight against it.

Doing exercise as a natrual part of your daily life - as part of the things you have to do - is so much easier than actively deciding to go and do exercise.

When I look at it like that i tend to come to the conclusion that although the fat are villified as lazy slobs, in fact it is the thin who are unusual in their approach. The larger individuals are just doing the minimum they have to - as they have always done - but these days it is much less.

yes eating habits have changed too - i blame the diet industry in part expecially for the classic female office worker move of teeny tiny lunch and then wolf down a packet of buscuits at 3. So we all need to eat better, and more regularly, and enough of the right things, and move around more.

So the first step for everyone to get thin is we need to make life harder physically for people not sure how that will go down...

I always thought that those japanese factories had a good idea where the whole workforce would have to start the day with a load of bending and stretching and jumping up and down.

I know it sounds ludicrous but actually it's a great idea. Do it in schools too.

I think that the car will prevail actually.

I reckon they will get cracking with renewables and we'll move over to electricity, with electric cars. That's how I see it happening.

What i hope is that the vehicles of the future will be automated so they don't crash into each other and people. And of course if they don't crash they won't need to be so big and bulky, they won't need to use so many resources in their construction.

So it will be better from an ecological/safety POV but no help with fatness.

We are just too chained to our cars to have teh disappear. I think of all things, that will be the thng the scientists and governments battle to find a solution for as the oil goes.

didn't they just find some massive new oil fields somewhere as well?

this made me laugh as I was about to come on here exactly to write about this.

I have today filled in a questionare from my 3 youngest school on it there is 2 questions that REALLY gets on my nerves

1 If you provide yoru child with a packed lunch do you think the contents are healthy

ERR YES Or I would NOT be making it for him.

and the 2nd one that REALLY gets to me

WOuld you find it helpful if we had stronger guidelines on what to provide in yrou childs lunchbox

I have responded No I woulf find it offensive.

under comments I have placed

I do not believe it is the schools job to educate me in how to parent. I have no objection in the chilren being spoken to about healthy eating but I find it objectionable when this spill sinto you wishing to educate me. I have a health of knowledge on this subject it is my job.

I know I will be marked down as a bi* however at this moment I genuinly dont care the info my children are getting from the school is wrong imo

(You should never eat sweets they are bad for you) errr yes sweets are not agreat thing but it is not a problem if we eat a small amount as long as you eat plenty of other good things instead.

schol dinners

You have to try at least 1 of the 2 vegetables.. I agree we should try a different amount of vegetables but if the choice is peas and cabbage then I have a 6 yea old whom is well aware that she doesnt like those 2 vegetabls she eats most other vegetables so why are we teaching her to be force fed all that will do is imprint a negative food image into her 6 year old brain.

my 10 year old has recently told me I am tired of broccoli mummy they do it at school dinners far to much.. the other day no thank you I dont feel like baked beans we have them so much at school (on checking the school dinner plan they have had broccoli and baked beans 5 times each in the last 10 days I get why she is fed up with it)

to me all this does is give our children the wrong messag about food I actually think THAT is far more important to tackle that questioning me if I am aware of what constitutes healthy eating.. work out healthy food attitude in the school first THEN come ask me if I know how to make a packed lunch box

Plus storage riven that's the real problem with electricity isn't it.

I think there will be a huge increase in small scale production in the next couple of decades - there are grants for solar panels, wind generators etc at home and the costs are coming down, and soon the govt are going to pay a guaranteed price for any electricity homeowners feed back into the grid.

Doesn't touch heavy industry etc but I really think we'll get there one way or another. The extreme heavy polluting approach will come to an end one way or another. Irrespective of whether people believe in climate chage theory or not, surely no-one can think it's generally a good thing to pump all these fumes into the atmosphere, purely from a health and quality of life POV.

lonnie yes i think that is driving a lot of people up the wall - the attitude to packed lunches vs school dinners. How one has to be super "healthy" and the other is chips and a pudding. Ridiculous.

lol Riven

I do very occationally permit my son a packet of crisps in his lunch box I also at times (shock horror) allow him a chocolate in it but he has a sandwich made from homemade bread every day (and knows to eat it) he has fruit cheese sticks salami sticks and dried fruit plus a drink so I know that giving him the occational thing like a packet of crisps and a chocolate is not going to ruin all of his appetite.

The key with healthy eating is balance and it isnt as simple as saying "this is healthy this is not" because if we go that ridgid all we really do is give our children very bad food images and thats what eating disorders comes from

Ha riven yes i am like that too.

i got in a bit of a pickle on a BF thread because of it.