Guilt Free Railing 12

[WouldBeGood]

The railing goes on

My Dc wouldn't eat school meals. 5 year old DS1 said "it sounds like it will be something tasty but then it just isn't". The main problem being that a lot of schools don't actually have kitchens suitable to actually make meals on-site, they are made and transported from other schools, so pasta is just mush in watery sauce by the time it's presented and rules are so strict about what can be served that it must be at times difficult to make a tasty decent meal.

Back in the day I'm sure they didn't analyse to the n'th degree what was in each meal. it just balanced over the week so that a day with cake and custard didn't actually matter - especially as everything was made fresh with no real e numbers and processed stuff involved.

@WouldBeGood completely agree. The latest decision of releasing the lockdown so close to the schools going back seems to have been a disaster

Yep it was madness to do both at the same time . But then the SNP have to follow a different plan to England no matter what the cost .

Yes its everything opening here at once. Schools and nightclubs,football etc. The young ones have been out mixing and they've all caught it. And school kids. All at oncem

I might be wrong but I suspect SG were daft enough to think furlough and other financial support would be extended. And when it wasn't it really gave them no choice to open up.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how important it is to have a nutritious diet and maintain a healthy weight.

And from there they decided the best course of action would be to.... well I don't need to repeat the last 18m but ffs

Ultimately this is another drop in the ocean plan that certain people will probably lap up because it fits the look how much the SNP cares narrative, but in reality will make fuck all difference.

This study is interesting and well worth the read.

https://www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.k211

Basically: healthy diet and increased activity in schools + school led family workshops and cooking classes.

Conclusions The primary analyses suggest that this experiential focused intervention had no statistically significant effect on BMI z score or on preventing childhood obesity.

I'll admit I am a bit biased here but one of the responses has raised points I've been increasingly curious about for a while.

https://www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.k211/rr-0

It's basically what the 'Fat Fiction' documentary talks about i.e. Obesity has risen in line with the demonisation of fat, the 'healthy' breakfast is the most important meal of the day rhetoric, and the advice to eat more fruit and vegetables.

The original data that a high carb low fat diet reduces heart disease was skewed by picking and choosing which random countries were included, and any subsequent lowering of heart disease could in fact be attributed to lower rates of smokers.

I'm not saying this is true, or trying to present this as facts and like I said, I'm a bit biased because I've just always preferred butter to marge, blue milk to green, cheese to crisps, disliked 90% of fruits and hated the way carbs made me feel. Also despised the thought of breakfast (much to the worry of my dear mammy growing up). As such I've always found it pretty easy to lose and maintain weight. I know exactly how a 2 sachet bowl of golden syrup porridge is going to make me feel for the rest of the day (hungry) and I can take it or leave it.

I have two daughters now and one is like me and naturally dislikes bread, potatoes etc while the other absolutely loves carbs.

Neither are obese, but it's the one whose favourite foods include mash, baked beans, and breakfast cereals who I constantly have to monitor because she is constantly snacky.

All this to say: I think if a targeted study in schools with the standard "healthy diet" makes no difference then the SNP are not only barking up the wrong tree with their Code of Practice for Children's Menus, they're not even in the same forest.

I agree with pp about education but I think there does come a time when we have to stop and actually check the education?

How many people do a 'CC' diet like SW or WW and either cannot stick to it (because it's incredibly difficult) or end up back where they started?

SW - where pasta is free, fruit is speed, and you should chop all the fat off your meat (the tasty filling part ).

@Lockdownbear

I might be wrong but I suspect SG were daft enough to think furlough and other financial support would be extended. And when it wasn't it really gave them no choice to open up.

So I was chatting to DH about this and the cock up..... He gets quite a bit more info from a public health perspective, lecture updates etc...... But to paraphrase him it was planned, they expected it to cause a sharp rise and they anticipated a sharp drop....... But it seems that rise is now a lot higher than they anticipated! But it was to get it out of the way before winter. Which if is true of the SG I find shocking and I didn't think that would be possible. It also goes against all their lectures and bunff about "cautious approach"!

I really don’t like the idea of vaccine passports and am surprised so few people seem to have an issue with it.

I agree it’s trying to target the younger age groups with lower vaccine uptake. I’m fine with other ways of doing that by making it easier to get vaccinated with more mobile sites, doing what you can to protect pay for anybody working who’s off sick with side-effects right afterwards. But shutting down parts of their social lives until they do is not a good principle, and I think in the long run it’ll just backfire and leave people with less faith in public institutions and ‘for your own good’ public health interventions.

Plus I bet a lot of people aren’t fussed because it fits into this “selfish young people wanting to go to nightclubs in a pandemic, why can’t you all just Stay The Fuck At Home” narrative. Which, after all that younger people have given up for the rest of society over the last 18 months, isn’t something we should be helping boost.

@Scottishskifun it's exactly the same as the English more or less unspoken policy. Except Scotland managed to mess it up by opening up more slowly ( subtext: look how responsible the SG is) when our schools opening earlier didn't support this as a plan.

I am getting progressively more annoyed on other threads when they point to schools opening in Scotland as being the sole cause of our dramatic rise in numbers. Well yes it is a cause, but you'll see they opened absolutely everything at the same time, so no it's not just that our DCs are germ ridden carriers.

I mean I wouldn't want to have to plan this stuff for all the tea in China ( probably a bad choice of words in this instance) but this is identical to what happened in Autumn 2020 in Scotland- SG opens stuff at glacially slow pace then when schools return goes sod it and opens the lot.

Yes I am getting a bit tired of the rise being blamed entirely on schools, when it started before schools return could possibly have an effect. If it was all down to schools you’d think it would have gone up first and fastest in school-aged children and in local authorities where schools went back earliest, and that is not what happened. But no, no, can’t be anything to do with wider issues, schools are all plague pits.

Mind you I’m also getting a bit tired of people in England clamouring for masks to be reintroduced again because that alone would drop cases. There’s five and a half million of us just north of you as a living example that masks don’t stop massive case spikes!

I've read back but can't find the specifics, can someone fill me in on the SG food proposals?

@GoldenOmber I do point out that mask wearing hasn't helped much, but then I get oh it would be worse without them . I do think if medical grade masks were used, they might be more helpful but for that to happen SG would need to insist on it and they won't because it will cost people a lot of money and be unpopular, so instead we all wear our germy wee rags.

Personally I think the only limiting factor on number of cases in Scotland atm is the number of tests that can be carried out as the system is at capacity.

I do feel slightly luck that primary aged kids aren't wearing the masks, in the US in many places they are, and it's horrible for them.

@MaxNormal

This

www.gov.scot/news/plan-to-make-eating-out-healthier

I'm glad Kluge is now saying boosters for vulnerable, vaccines won't end the pandemic.

www.reuters.com/world/europe/higher-european-covid-19-transmission-rates-deeply-worrying-who-europe-head-2021-08-30/

@mapleleavesreturn

I do feel slightly luck that primary aged kids aren't wearing the masks, in the US in many places they are, and it's horrible for them.

And younger - toddlers in many places But they really, really like masks over there, and also still seem stuck in the mid-2020 mindset of “if only enough people did covid right then it would all go away and stop bothering us.”

LizzieMacQueen thanks.

I definitely think England tried to plan a spike / build natural immunity over the summer while hospitals were quiet and not full of flu and usual winter stuff.

Why Scotland decided to go against that logic is beyond me.

Covid is here to stay, people are tired of restrictions. Few will accept another you
"Canny visit your Granny spell"- including the Grannies.

I just can't imagine young primary kids in masks all day. Most other countries kids are in preschool / kindergarten until 6+. It was bad enough last year asking them to wear masks on the bus.

If schools are on the view that ties are an infection risk because kids chew, suck and wipe noses on them, what the heck would they do with masks? .
And that's before you take into account LOs who like trying on other people's stuff. Or who drop them etc etc.

I can't see how primary aged or younger kids in masks all day is anything other than a developmental disaster, but try saying that on a Twitter feed with US followers.

I hope that were coming into sanity, glad to see WHO talking about boosters for vulnerable and that covid can't be contained.

It makes sense to try and get the spike out of the way before Winter @Scottishskifun, and I'm glad they did eventually come to that realisation (even if it was privately), although yes, they have massively cocked it up in their execution. To be fair to them though, I think everyone is a bit surprised by exactly how badly it's going for Scotland and there must be some underlying difference up here. I do think that relying mainly on vaccines for immunity was the wrong call and might be at least part of our issue, as was this bizarre notion doing the rounds that the best (or sometimes only!) way to get immunity was via vaccination. This is to ask too much of vaccines that actually have done a great job in getting mortality down, which is realistically all a lot of them do.

One thing I do think the UK has gotten right is exempting children from wearing masks, and I look on with horror at what the US is going, with no regard whatsoever to the effects on development.

I have a fair few US friends, they mask their toddlers in empty fields. Can't have someone at the opposite side of it mistake you for a trump supporter, can you?

A large part of the pandemic over there seems to be doing the polar opposite of what Trump endorses, or doing the polar opposite of what Fauci endorses.

As such it makes it almost impossible to have discussions with them because it's not really about studies or science (which is always up for debate), it's about identity.

To them, noble lies are always justified because so many people are categorically stupid and need to be lied to for their own good.

You can definitely draw parallels to the way things are heading over here, I think?

Who cares if our messaging had people believing 10% (HALF A MILLION!!) people in Scotland had already died by July 2020... their ignorance kept them safe.

@Revertion I do think the politicisation of masks in the US has driven their wearing as a symbol of goodness, and not being a Trump supporter. I think if he’d mandated masks things would look very different. They wouldn’t have achieved this symbolic status across the world.

In some ways masks could be increasing spread.

My US relatives genuinely believe masks are some magic talisman that will ward off all evil. I remember them saying oh yes I had DD over and did loads of cooking- but of course we were wearing masks - and thinking that the mask wouldn't make much difference, I suppose it would lower viral load possibly.

I do think in Scotland they are clearly not doing much to reduce spread. I'm fairly ambivalent about them, I wear my comfy cloth one because I have to, but unless they are the medical grade ones I can't see they're going to do much frankly.

no doubt about it - the dems politicised covid as a vote winner so now any measure Trump didn't enforce is a political statement. Some data scientists have dared to question the science behind cloth mask wearing and they've ended up retreating due to the nastiness of the debate.

In most places they couldn't get parents and officials to agree to open primaries without masks in place. Dismal science indeed.

Mind you, there has always been a more germ aware fringe in the US - back 15+ years ago when we lived there the use of anti bacterial wipes in supermarkets, gloves, plastic throw away covers for loo seats etc were commonplace.