Denmark introduces "fat tax"

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news.sky.com/home/world-news/article/16081190

We should do the same - and use the money to pay for an income tax cut.

chucklemummy, I think the reasons poor people have a lower life expectancy are more complicated than just their food intake. The Chief Medical Officer for Scotland, Sir Harry Burns, a really inspiring speaker, has been doing alot of work on this to try and understand why poor people are so disadvantaged & alot of it comes down to family. Dysfunctional family life has a far greater impact on life expectancy than any other factor (including smoking!). This is why I object to massive nanny state interventions - I think they are largely useless & cost alot of money. I would love to know what the solution is to sorting out family life, for those where it is so disrupted & dysfunctional - but I suspect it is not any easy answer.

I should have said that Sir Harry hasn't just been looking at why the poor are so disadvantaged, but also why their life expectancy is so much lower. In fact I think that is where he started: why do some Scottish postcodes have such low life expectancy?

It hits the poor and the working class.

Have just been grappling this problem myself. I have CFS, a poorly-understood and debilitating autoimmune condition. It has made me very poor. I know shedloads about nutrition and, before I got poor, used to eat a 90% whole food, mainly organic, diet. I've stuck to my diet balance (cooking from scratch these days) using cheaper ingredients, which are mass-produced and therefore not 'whole' or organic.

I'm not getting better, so have been costing out a return to my previous food standards. It will cost two and a half times as much. That's a 150% increase in my food budget.

I do actually think mass-produced foods are a lifesaver; they enable the less-well-off to eat a nutritionally balanced diet. It's just a shame that so much claptrap - five a day; saturated fats; e-numbers - is pumped at us, you have to be an amateur food chemist to sift out the facts. The problem isn't the food, it's the publicity.

i have no problem with it hitting the poor and working class harder. Maybe they (and everyone of all income levels) will be arsed to buy and prepare fresh food, which is actually much cheaper than take-aways and processed junk.

garlic - I frankly don't know what sorts of food you might be talking about. I don't think "mass produced" is the problem. Rice and lentils are mass produced but dirt cheap.

Dysfunctional family life has a far greater impact on life expectancy than any other factor - I didn't know this had come up in the study, but agree wholeheartedly. The pernicious effects of extended families living at close quarters tend get forgotten in nostalgia for a non-existent past.

I've already said I'm eating the same stuff in its cheaply-produced versions, chandellina. The idea that the poor all live on ready-made crap is insane. Poor people can't afford takeaways. Cheap ready-made (frozen/chilled) dishes actually contain fewer additives than the posh versions.

What you can't afford are: high-quality protein sources; wholegrain/organic bread, pasta, rice; chemical-free fruit & veg, and so on.

I think this tax is a simply a tax.
There's no concern here about peoples health. If there was then the tax should be on processed foods and then it's the maufacturers who should be penalised for pushing such rubbish on to the consumers.

People are never a concern. It's always about money.

The government want more money. Maufacturers use cheap ingredients and add chemicals to increase profits.

... and, if the population weren't fed so much bollocks about 'healthy' diets, they would eat more proper meat & dairy products, more fruit instead of things 'made with fruit' and more nutritious fillers like bread. (Factory bread in the UK has added vitamins to replace those lost in processing.)

garlicSV, Hmmm, I'm not sure he is talking about any "pernicious effects" of extended families living in close quarters - quite the reverse - unless I am very mistaken. He is talking about families, where children live with different parents for different periods of time, where fathers are absent completely, where fallings out with parents and relatives, mean that there is no extended network, where substance abuse means that kids live ferral because they don't have a proper carer. chandellina - I'm also not sure that it is about people being "arsed" to buy & prepare fresh food. When you are very poor & live in poor areas, you'll find there aren't many supermarkets & you have to use convenience stores. Convenience stores are expensive & tend not to have as many perishable goods (fresh fruit & veg), so your options are much more limited. Much easier to buy a fray bentos pie & tin of beans, which you know will fill a hole than be trying to mess around with onions, peppers & rice - all of which you have to put on the buggy & lug up 10 flights of stairs. You also have to know how to cook & probably have more than just a ring & a microwave.

Cogito

I agree that book sounds good. However, the example he gives isn't great.

"And his main test is 'would your grandmother recognise it as food?'... his example being yogurt in a squirty tube. Would she even know it was meant to be edible?"

As long as it is just yoghurt then yes she certainly would recognise it as food. Yoghurt has been around for millenia. She might not recognise the packaging but that is irrelevant. That's like saying she wouldn't recognise tomatoes if they come in a Tupperware.

So, good book, crap example.

Bugsy - the idea that there are wildernesses with no access to fresh food has been almost entirely discredited. I live in fact in a very poor area and my local convenience shops have a great selection of vegetables and fruit, many offered in bowls in large quantities for £1.

People of all incomes seek convenience - it is certainly not in any way difficult to make cheap and healthy meals for far less than the average family spends on crap food.

i find these arguments ridiculous, as if you need a higher degree to prepare lentils, make a vegetable soup, fry up some mince and tomatoes, or boil dry spaghetti.

OK, thanks, Bugsy, I'll look up what he said before pontificating
Totally agree with the second part of your post. (Pie & beanz isn't that bad a meal, though you'd be better off with chops than the pie.)

minipie - I took issue with that bit too. (although wasn't it "great-grandmother"?) - I mean "your" (great) grandmother. I don't know if my great grandmother would recognise a kiwi fruit as food, but it is one (in the terms of the book).

(If grandmother - I don't think there is anything our generation can teach theirs about weird quasi-foods - they had whole shelves of books where the writers congratulate themselves on cooking entirely from artificial long life store cupboard ingredients)

I think a fat tax would hit the lazy ones hardest i/e those who open packets instead of cooking from scratch.

chandellina, how did you acquire your cooking skills?

agree entirely vezzie, on both counts.

Bugsy2 - I learnt mine from becoming poor. Couldn't afford to eat the way I did before so got books from charity shop, and nicked my mum's ones from which I had only done baking before as a child. I had to look up a swede to see what it was when it came hope in a veg bag from local fruit and veg co-op.

Bugsy - how does anyone? by trying. I started trying to make a few easy things and took it from there.

I was taught by my mum & we had to do home economics up until 3rd year in senior school, that is why I am curious. At uni, I taught other people I lived with - but I was shocked they didn't know the basics.

At uni, I taught other people I lived with - but I was shocked they didn't know the basics.
I'll never forget the housemate who bought omelette powder (dried eggs - didn't know you could still get them!) and then asked us to help her cook it.
Bless her, she was lovely :)

We did teach her how to break eggs, obv.

Just to say that I've been ploughing through cookbooks and home economics books from the early part of the 20th century over the last year for my housekeeping blog, and working out the costs and calories involved in these diets, heavy as they were in saturated fat and meat.

Most of us simple could not afford to eat as much meat as the average working family put away (you'd end up spending £70-£80 a week on meat and fish alone for a family of four), and we could not afford to home grow as much produce as many families did - we rely on mass produced fruit and veg which works out a lot cheaper, but which are probably lower in nutritional values. The calorific values of their diets were much greater than ours, as the meals had a heavy emphasis on animal fats like suet, lard, whole milk, and carbohydrates.

However people's average weights were lower, and the only reason for this as far as I can see is the amount of walking they did, and the absence of TV, which meant they engaged in a lot more low level exercise throughout the day instead of slumping on the sofa for hours on end like many of us do. There was less snacking as well, which may have meant that blood sugar and leptin levels were controlled differently.

They were also shorter and children matured later, probably because of illness in early childhood and in some cases a poor quality diet deficient in calcium and other vital minerals in the case of poor households.

So taxing fat seems pointless - it would make more sense to focus on increasing low level exercise for the whole population. However taxing things actively raises money for the government, which makes me suspicious about the motives here, given there is no evidence that simply avoiding fat makes you slim (which it doesn't - if only it were that simple!)

Boffinmum - yes more exercise but the real revolution in nutrition was from the acceleration in production of concentrated forms of sugar such as high fructose corn syrup that could be stuffed into just about any product and has been. Also hydrogenated fats that held together biscuits and cakes for a longer shelf life.

This is true - hidden crap in food means people don't know what they're getting into, and I am convinced there's a link with poor blood sugar control as well as problems with leptin control, satiety and so on when things like that are sneaked into food. But at the end of the day, if you cook for yourself you reduce the overall amount of trans fats and so on you are ingesting and improve your overall health.