No.
Government only has one legitimate purpose: To protect the inalienable freedoms & liberties (life, liberty, property, and pursuit of happiness) of individuals.
Um, it’s the same thing in this instance, Crafter_Man. Initial fraud is coercion, and therefore an assault on liberty.
Oh, nice. Yeah, by all means, let’s pull this thread off-topic to slam a political group.
This particular liberal thinks that education is the key. We have abundant food labeling, but people don’t know how to read the labels, and have no idea what the numbers mean, and have no idea what numbers they should be shooting for. We don’t need much of a government program to achieve that.
Sorry, ivylass, that I don’t fit into your narrowminded ideas of what a liberal should be.
Oh, I forgot. Here is a decent website for nutritional information, although they’ve recently made a few “improvements” that make it far suckier.
Ya know, I really don’t understand people who say “people need to be taught how to make educated choices about proper nutrition.” or “Package labels are confusing,” etc.
I have never been confused by a package label. Serving size, servings per container, calories per serving, amounts of various nutrients, it’s all right there on the package.
Same for ingredients. Ingredients- starch, grease, salt, something I can’t pronounce, something I can’t pronounce, something else I can’t pronounce… probably not good for me.
And really, is there anyone over the age of six in the U.S. or Western Europe (or Australia and New Zealand, for that matter) who doesn’t know that chips, soda, fast food, food that is high in fat and suger, is not good for you? They teach you about the four food groups in elementary school, folks.
It’s not that hard, folks. Read the label. Do a bit of simple math. If “serving sizes” are artificially small, figure out how many cookies/chips/whatever are an actual serving, and muliply by two, three, eleven, whatver.
Also, I have long maintained that stupidity has an element of will. The obese, or people with obese children, are not uninformed about nutrition. The information is readily and freely available. All you have to do is turn on a TV or radio, sooner or later the news will come on, and odds are pretty good there will be some nutrition related story. Went to a public school? You learned about the aforementioned food groups, and how many servings you should eat a day. Those who eat too much of the wrong things are stupid. The information is out there. They choose to ignore it.
A few weeks ago, I was enjoying a spinach chicken salad at Wendy’s. Big, tasty salad. Dressing was a bit high in sugar, but since the rest of the salad was all green and leafy and proteiny, it wasn’t a big deal. A few bites into my salad, a woman who was about my height and about three times as big around as me (and I’m carrying an extra 20 lbs myself) sat down at a table with a huge sloppy whatever Wendy’s huge sloppy burger is, supersize fries, and a drink which I’m assuming was flavored sugar water with bubbles- unless she was one of those who thinks a diet soda negates the calories in the rest of the meal.
Now, if this woman wants to eat like that, that’s her business. I do have the occasional sloppy burger myself, though they’re not a regular part of my diet. But when she keels with a heart attack or stroke, she does not have the right to claim that she was seduced by the horrible fast food company’s advertising. Wendy’s advertises their (very tasty) spinach chicken salad as well. It’s prominently displayed on the menu. The woman has, every time she walks into a fast food place, the choice to get a salad and, if she must, get a small burger on the side to satisfy that burger craving. But she chose the Big Sloppy Burger and More Fries Than The Human Stomach Was Designed to Contain [sub][sup]TM[/sub][/sub].
We don’t need a mass government educational campaign. The information is out there, practially floating through the ether. But you can’t force people to make wise choices based on that easily available information.
I am not familiar with the circumstances of the poor in the UK, but here in the States, convenience food is often easier to come by for those lower on the socio-economic scale. In other words, groceries in poorer neighborhoods frequently charge more than in affluent neighborhoods for healthy food, it’s often dangerous to go to the market or walk outside for exercise, and carrying a load of groceries on the bus is extremely difficult, while a cab is sometimes prohibitively expensive. Is that also true there?
What happened to insurance height/weight charts and you paying out the wazoo if you were overweight?
Taxing food won’t do any good and harms those who aren’t overweight.
But you can bet that if Britian slapped a monthly graduated tax surcharge on the obese (say $20 a month for every 10 extra pounds of fat you carry), people would be pretty damn motivated to lose weight.
Where in this thread or in any or the stories linked has somebody talked about a tax on food?
Education and getting the companies to act responsible is basically what everyone from the Government report to the BBC to the posters here are saying.
Frankly this kind of knee-jerk reaction scares the hell out of me. I am so tired of criminal charges being brought against parents because ‘something must be done.’ How about parenting classes with each successive pregnancy?
It does take some effort to feed kids healthily, and more than a little will power. My kids aren’t allowed to have premade foods (lunchables, hot pockets, frozen crap) or anything that changes the color of their poo. These parents just need to learn “If you are not hungry now, your plate will be here waiting for you when you ask for some chips in a half hour.” Jail time and making the parents go broke fom lawyers is not going to help that.
I don’t think that people are unconcerned, just overwhelmed. It would have been considerably easier for me to pop in a frozen pizza at the end of work and a commute, than it would have been to cook up a pot of rice and some chicken. I just happen to think that premade foods taste like crap and are too expensive because there are no leftovers for lunch. I also agree with the posters who’ve stated that more realistic portions should be listed. (who eats 2.5 cookies from a 3 pack bag?)
Overlyverbose, I go to supermarkets in poorer neighborhoods because the real food (meat, milk, cereal) is cheaper. The convenience foods are cheaper as well, but they are usually not the national best seller brand, more often a caribbean-based brand.
I was referring to both yojimbo’s post (“And yet the government report that is talked about in nearly all the BBC links provided say that people are confused by labelling.”) and also Go You Big Red’s post about one serving being about 60% of a can of pop.
Play Devil’s Advocate. Why are people saying it’s confusing?
If it’s a matter of just simple math, then survey’s wouldn’t consistently find that people are confused. I suspect the problem is trying to relate the numbers to day-to-day life and eating – what you are given, how it was prepared, how much you were given – IMHO this is where people are getting confused (particularly if they aren’t the ones who prepared the meal). You look at you plate with 5 different items on it, five different servings each with a different RDI percentage of fat, cholesteral, sodium, etc. So, there we have basic math again, if you want to figure out your totals for the one meal, then your totals for the day…
The other half of the equation is packaging. One can of pop is 1.5 servings? Buy a single snack bag of chips from a vending machine to find out you have 2.5 servings in the bag? Okay, more math, no biggie, but you perceive the experience as “I ate one snack” not 2.5.
I think the labelling is totally adequate, I personally have no probem deciphering them, but, playing Devil’s Advocate, the numbers don’t necessarily mean anything to a lot of people from a practical, every day, what’s-on-my-plate point of view. I suspect that a lot of people aren’t reading labels because they don’t correlate the numbers to what’s on their plate over a period of time. (Then you have the little asterisk on the label that says “Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet. Your dietary values may be higher or lower depending on your calorie needs.” It ads a bit of uncertainty to the mix.) My FIL is an educated man, a retired accountant whose math skills are well above par – the RDI percantages mean nothing to him. He’s has no idea what his calorie needs may be or what “Calories=90/Calories from Fat=30” means for his breakfast.
I can’t really think of any alternatives though. The labelling does tell you everything you need to know. Nonetheless, I can understand how people are getting confused (which was the point of my previous post).
Question: Back in my day of 7th grade “home ec” we were taught how to plan and prepare healthy meals. Nothing about how to read a label. What do they do these days? Are FDA (and UK equivalent) labels covered in general health and nutrition classes?
It had to do with food combining and amino acids. It was not difficult to find the information I wanted once I’d refined my search, but I was surprised by the amount of glut that turned up initially. I made the mistake of using the word “diet” in my search. Once that was out of the way, I had to further refine my search because most of what turned up were sites that were touting the next big thing in supplements that will make your muscles big like Conan’s.
Sure, she should have known that such a meal contributes to her weight problem, but here’s the deal: Restaurants are not required to put labels on the food they sell. Some are volunteering the information, but only on their websites, which are unavailable from their counters. And portion sizes in the US are out of control. We have come to think of a pound of food as normal.
Should we limit, by law, portion sizes in restaurants? Yeah, as if. Such a law has no way of passing. We want our money’s worth, dammit!
What’s needed, I think, is to reevaluate our whole mindset on eating. We need to redefine what we consider normal eating habits. We need to demand of markets and restaurants that we get whole foods cheap and processed foods not at all. We need to learn to see past the bullshit advertizing in commercials and on boxes. A tax won’t do this.
What can the government do, if anything? Well, for one thing, do a study on what actually works, and possibly restrict the sale of diet books found to be harmful (this probably isn’t possible, what with free speech and all). We are so inundated with Atkins and South Beach and Grapefruit and Low Fat and FenPhen that it’s hard to make any sense of any of it. Most of these plans to beat all plans make it to bookshelves without once having had even the most cursory flirtation with science.
Personally I don’t think the government should be involved at all (other than requiring labeling and truthful advertizing), but if you insist on more government intervention, insist that they apply a little research to the subject.
miamouse, I get where you’re coming from, but I think this is an egregious case.
This kid didn’t die of obesity because its parents occaisonally fed it a microwave pizza or let it eat Lunchables or something. It’s not like the kid went from skinny to morbidly obese overnight; it’s not like this was some hard-to-spot medical condition that took its life without warning.
These parents had to have seen that their child was morbidly obese every day, and it still got so fat that it died. If someone didn’t provide their child enough food, and it died of starvation, I don’t think anyone would argue that the parent was acting negligently. If someone lets their kid eat so much shit that it dies of heart failure at the age of three, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the kid died because the parents were negligent.
It’s a bit different here in St. Louis. I live in a fairly affluent neighborhood, but it’s right next to a very poor neighborhood. And from what I’ve observed, all the “grocery” stores in the neighborhood are convenience stores. Most of the fruits & vegetables, the ones they stock anyway, are really expensive - more so than in the grocery I normally go to, and at least half are rotten. And the stores are the scariest I’ve ever been in. They frequently have bars and bullet-proof windows, and a lot of them are notorious meeting places for drug dealers. I’m fortunate enough to have a car, so I usually drive to the high-end grocery a few miles away, but when I was still having seizures I couldn’t drive, so the only store I could go to was in the poor neighborhood, and I will never go again if I have the option. I guess it’s different depending upon where you live.
Corporations have no power over me. None. Nada. Zip. Zero. The only thing that has power over me is government. Therefore, I do not need any “protection” from corporations. What I need – what we all need – is protection from government. Not corporations.
Oh yeah. At least half. In some cases, all. About the only foods I’d ever eat from those places is pre-packaged stuff with lots of preservatives, because I wouldn’t feel safe eating anything else. This was my situation for a very long time. Still is, but now at least I have a grocery store I can go to instead.
Another big problem is that our lives are so busy we don’t always have time to think about what we eat. It’s always easier for me to grab a sub and a bag of chips than to cook for myself. I’m a busy guy, and can’t be bothered. But at least now it’s an option for me. The last place I worked, I usually worked late into the night, so dinner was something delivered, or picked up from the local fast food place. And of course I never felt like exercising when I got home at 11pm.
Just so you know, Ruby Tuesday has started to print nutrition info on the menus so that you have the information on hand in the restaurant. It’s quite eye-opening.
For example, Tuesday’s Colossal Burger has 1,677 kcals, 114g fat, and 73g carbohydrates. This does not include the side. If you get fries, you can add 185 kcals, 9g fat, and 19g carbohydrates to that. If you open with an appetizer at around 300 kcals per person and close the meal with a dessert at around 700 kcals, you can easily eat almost 3000 kcals in a single meal. This is the problem with this country – the amount of food that’s considered normal is way out of line with our activity levels.
Yikes!
And from what I understand, those figures might not even be accurate. They may have tested a representative burger for content, but what you get on your plate may not be all that representative. I’ve heard (with no cite to back me) that some restaurants will increase portion sizes while still printing nutritional information for a smaller portion. Still, at least it’s a help.
I shop at middle-of-the-road supermarkets and I find that fruits, veggies, and fresh meats are ridiculous. It’s the crappy stuff, the Hamburger Helper, frozen dinners, etc - those are the things we can afford. Milk is expensive, but I think it’s gotten like that everywhere around here. And cereal? Yikes!
That means that a large portion of our budget goes towards healthy food - more than we should be budgeting. I try to eat mostly fresh fruits, vegetables, etc. Because we try to eat healthier, we’re penalized for it with higher prices? I was vegan for two years, and could easily spend $75 a week on food just for me. I do eat meat now, but very little of it, and yet, our grocery bill is still insanely high.
I don’t think the government needs to regulate what people eat, but it would be nice if we could find some way to bring down the costs of fresh, healthy foods. It’s been discussed before that the lower class eat so badly because they can’t afford to eat healthy. I don’t know how true that is, since WIC is only good for certain foods, but AFAIK, food stamps aren’t regulated - and if you’re trying to feed four kids on $100 in food stamps, you won’t get far with fresh fruits, veggies, and meats.
Thank goodness I really like tomatoes, squash, and bananas - asparagus and red peppers are an unusual treat. And while I won’t eat frozen dinners laden with preservatives, there are two types that I love, made with fresh ingredients and no preservatives or chemicals - Amy’s Vegetarian meals, and Seeds of Change frozen meals. All-natural ingredients and much more filling and tasty than WW or Lean Cuisines. Unfortunately, they’re also twice the price.
Ava
That strikes me as a somewhat naive statement. For one thing, government is accountable to us, while corporations are not (unless we’re shareholders). Corporations can control the exchange of ideas, write legislation to protect themselves from us, dump toxins in your drinking water, assault your children with propoganda, and manage the economy to lower wages, etc. You definitely need to be wary of corporate power.
Can I make a suggestion on this? Do you eat much frozen vegetables? They would probably have lest sodium and can be cheaper than fresh. Plus, since they are frozen pretty much immediately after they are picked, they were probably frozen at a fresher point than the fresh fruit that came from god only knows how far away.
Susan