I love this thread. And now I am going to sound like a sad, mad old bag!
The diet issue is hiding a vital fact. We have vast numbers of people in this country, adults and children who have no idea what they are eating. We have families who exist of pre-prepared food who don't have the fisrt idea what is going into the food that they buy and eat.
In the good old days when people cooked from scratch they knew how much fat was in a pie, for the simplest reason, they had put it there! So they could make reasonable choices about their fat and salt intake. They may not always have got it right, but at least the basic information was there. This just isn't the case for some kids today.
I teach science. I would say that about 40% of the kids I teach have no real idea what real food is. All of the infomation that they have is provided by advertising....I have lost count of the number of kids with gum disease and rotten teath who tell me that squash and Sunny D are 'healthy'. Many of them cannot, at the age of 11 eat with a knife and fork.
We don't need to have a traffic lights system about food, we need to teach people how to cook! And then Sit down and eat, with a knofe and fork and interested conversation. Bring back cookery lessons , not food tech. Lets get kids to cook meat and two veg, soups, and dare I say it, proper pastry with LARD
HMB, Disgusted Tumbridge Wells