Obesity

[mudsticks]

We did our nations health no favours when we industrialised our food system post war.

On top of a diet that had already been affected by our colonial adventures, giving us cheap sugar and other high calorie imported foodstuff.

High calorie, but often low nutrition food is cheaper to grow, process, store, transport than fresh stuff. On the whole.

Those calories are mostly produced by large quantities of diesel, and agrochemicals..
We're basically eating oil.

Whereas fresh stuff requires at least some human labour, which costs more, of course.

The drive for ever cheaper (but in truth externalised cost) food has been relentless - cheered on from all sides.

To the detriment on environment, and human health.

So now we have generations for whom eating fresh vegetables at the recommended rate of 40% of their plate is a totally alien concept.

Compounded by poor availability of such produce in many more deprived areas.

Plus de-skilling in cooking techniques, and or time and facilities available to even do that.

Low income food used to be a vegetable heavy, peasant diet that was largely unprocessed, now it's the polar opposite.

And of course we're still battling against our 'hunter gather' palates that favour salty, sugary high caloric food, that are scarce in nature.

But surround us in overabundance nowadays.

If we're stressed, tired, bored , unhappy or so forth, we reach for the easy comfort foods.

Then we feel less well, the cycle continues.

We put on weight, we feel less inclined to move..And on it goes...

Multinational food production businesses have a lot of dollar invested in pretty much maintaining our addiction to the status quo, in terms of their hold on the food system.

If governments care about the health of their nation, there are things they can actively do, such as enforcing higher standards for public procurement, good school food etc.

In addition to supporting more indigenous fresh food production to make it available and affordable for everyone.

Various schemes are afoot.

There are some new farm support proposals being developed to encourage better diets (and better farming) in this country.

But it all takes time, political and public will, and it's difficult to get much traction with a government that doesn't even regard nutritious food availability as a 'public good' (as health and education are)
It's all left to the market' which clearly has failed.

Right , I'd better get on - those fresh peas aren't going to harvest themselves.

 

[winjim]

We did our nations health no favours when we industrialised our food system post war.

On top of a diet that had already been affected by our colonial adventures, giving us cheap sugar and other high calorie imported foodstuff.

High calorie, but often low nutrition food is cheaper to grow, process, store, transport than fresh stuff. On the whole.

Those calories are mostly produced by large quantities of diesel, and agrochemicals..
We're basically eating oil.

Whereas fresh stuff requires at least some human labour, which costs more, of course.

The drive for ever cheaper (but in truth externalised cost) food has been relentless - cheered on from all sides.

To the detriment on environment, and human health.

So now we have generations for whom eating fresh vegetables at the recommended rate of 40% of their plate is a totally alien concept.

Compounded by poor availability of such produce in many more deprived areas.

Plus de-skilling in cooking techniques, and or time and facilities available to even do that.

Low income food used to be a vegetable heavy, peasant diet that was largely unprocessed, now it's the polar opposite.

And of course we're still battling against our 'hunter gather' palates that favour salty, sugary high caloric food, that are scarce in nature.

But surround us in overabundance nowadays.

If we're stressed, tired, bored , unhappy or so forth, we reach for the easy comfort foods.

Then we feel less well, the cycle continues.

We put on weight, we feel less inclined to move..And on it goes...

Multinational food production businesses have a lot of dollar invested in pretty much maintaining our addiction to the status quo, in terms of their hold on the food system.

If governments care about the health of their nation, there are things they can actively do, such as enforcing higher standards for public procurement, good school food etc.

In addition to supporting more indigenous fresh food production to make it available and affordable for everyone.

Various schemes are afoot.

There are some new farm support proposals being developed to encourage better diets (and better farming) in this country.

But it all takes time, political and public will, and it's difficult to get much traction with a government that doesn't even regard nutritious food availability as a 'public good' (as health and education are)
It's all left to the market' which clearly has failed.

Right , I'd better get on - those fresh peas aren't going to harvest themselves.

View attachment 591780

I've been wondering where you got to. Nice to see you back.

 

[mudsticks]

I've been wondering where you got to. Nice to see you back.

Hi Jim


I'd gone a wandering in the far Northwest of Scotland for a while
(and getting the farm ready to leave so I could go there)

Apologies for skimming the last dozen or so pages, chaps and chapesses. The first twenty-odd were very interesting and informative.

Neuro-divergent brains - I’m a recent initiate to that tribe - react very differently to appetites than do neuro-typical brains. Others have posted interesting stuff about this. Dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. And more dopamine please. And those brains, and the people who own them, have no control over that. Or much less than a “normal” brain would have.

As an aside, there is over-use of the word “normal”, wherever we go. Honestly, I never am sure what it means. Surely everything human is on a scale? How can one decide what is right in the middle, or correct, or acceptable? My new mantra is “beware those who call things normal”. Your maths dudes would probably use words like “mean” and “median” and ”average”. I’ll go away and summon up my inner Tim Hartford and learn how to do it all better myself.

If you do have real difficulty with maintaining a healthy weight range, or a weight range with which you are okay, do have a think about your own potential neuro-divergence. There may be a causal link. Of the five or so percent of the adult population with neurological disorder, only ten percent of those people are ever diagnosed and treated. A sad and shameful statistic.

Of course I’m not trying to say that many or most people overweight have a neurological disorder. Modern food systems are obese: they are messed up, engorged monsters. Modern mass produced food is obese: cheap and plentiful. Modern living is obese: sedentary, push-button and automated. Gratification is under constant fingertip control.

Idly, I sometimes wonder at the apathy which abounds all around this engrained health challenge. Witness this last couple of years for me:

My “fighting“ weight - at my very best I am a stocky barrel of gristle, lard and sinew from a life wrangling wood and stone - is fourteen stones. At 5’10“ that probably has my BMI at 27. My “capitulating and trying to outrun flabbiness” weight is sixteen stones - locked woods gates during the pandemic; farms and domestic gardens closed to all-comers; the panic of possible eviction for over a year; unmedicated. That probably would mean my heart might pop at the next axe-swing or hammer blow this season.

Fortunately, I can fight my own corner, get access finally to help re neurological challenges etc, as spelled out in the Personals. And, despite all other obstacles, I can still get out into nature to move about, or ride my bike, or take on more physical work as I get stronger.

Still, my GP and the surgery more widely are not clambering over one another to offer help for fat-fighting. The offers are oblique. I can only speak for myself, and the few other middle aged men I know locally who variously struggle to keep to a healthy weight: help is probably there, but it is all rather passive.

Six years ago I ran a woodcraft programme for young people in Sheffield. We built an outdoor gym to entertain those clients, who were at risk of leaving school with no qualifications. The wood gym was a real success. Ropes, pulleys, wooden weights, wooden press bench, drag a bag of sand uphill. Chin up branch. The group designed most of it. Great stuff. Hours of fun and competition and engagement and calorie burning.

Mentioned it to my GP In passing, and he tried to get a meeting with the local health pyramid, whatever that is. And he tried and he tried, and in the end we just gave up. He was right into getting something off the ground locally for people recovering from operations or for people who needed to be motivated to walk and exercise. But, the wheels just turned so slowly, we all got sick of waiting and moved on.

Food is also a very nuanced political issue. Farming practices need to change worldwide, but definitely in the UK. We are too reliant on the old habit of importing and relying on the commonwealth, and the danger is that this will deepen as we move away from Europe to new food market deals. A recent detailed study by some very clever French scientists has concluded that the UK can sustain itself in food production if it moves to a more diverse, modern use of land, and if people are encouraged to change how they consume. All bets are off that the Tories will bring about anything radical that might upset Big Agric.

Poor people have far less access to high nutrition foods, and have a much narrower choice and less buying power toward eating healthily. They are less mobile, less informed, less served.

In the last five years I’ve worked in schools in areas of high deprivation where it is not unusual for children to be sent to school with mouldy bread for their sandwiches. Projects where young people are asked to bring food for lunch outdoors must always be underpinned with a food budget for those who have nothing to bring. If we can, we ensure that food is part of the offer, otherwise shame and embarrassment often ensue for those without.

I sell spoons and wooden things for the kitchen at a local food circle, where local producers all gather to sell their wares within a 25 mile radius of the city. Small farms and micro growers, and little makers like me, all cranking in on bikes or sharing lifts. But the clientele are still almost all middle class, despite the site being slap bang in the poorest part of the city. No matter, you just have to keep pressing on, and trying to aim for change.

We all need to play our part in this. We ought to stop pouring our cash down the necks of the absurdly obese multi-nationals running our food production and instead feed to healthy plumpness the local, the real, the small, the sustainable growers, makers, producers.

I think you might mean this study ?

https://www.soilassociation.org/cau...i-report-ten-years-for-agroecology-in-europe/

 

[BoldonLad]

Rickets is coming back. There's been a large increase in diagnosis of Vit D deficiency in recent years, although that could be due to improved methods and more requests for Vit D analysis. There aren't many cases of rickets per year, but they are increasing.

Incidentally, obesity itself is a risk factor for deficiency of Vit D, and other fat soluble vitamins.

Isn’t rickets a vitamin C deficiency?

Isn’t vitamin D the one you get from sunlight?

Or have I failed my NVQ Nutrition?

 

[KnittyNorah]

F** me, that "what are we feeding our kids" was worth it just for the sorry tale of the floating supermarket Nestle sent up and down the amazon for years supposedly delivering nutrition to benighted riverside folk but in truth stacked full of ice cream, chocolate , iced lollies* and other similar junk.
Followed of course by the beeb having to insert the customary additive-rich Nestle PR/lawyer statement.
Folk with a tendency to value more fibre in their intellectual diet will I hope see through this/see what the likes of Nestle are really about.

* nothing wrong with them in moderation of course/.as an occasional treat but it's all too clear that that's not how they are used/promoted.

I started avoiding Nestle products like the plague when it came to my attention - sometime in the early 1970s - of their activities in promoting milk formulae for babies in third world countries - where the water supply to make it up was, course, often polluted and where people were - and still are - too damned poor to buy it, so are apt to over-dilute it . They are a terrible example of the evil - yes evil - that can result from the mantra of 'more profit at any cost'. I don't even particularly like babies - but heck I don't think it's the right and proper thing to do to go round actively promoting stuff that has already killed lots of them and will kill or damage many more. Not when, in most cases, the original substance is available and is cheaper, easier, better for baby and above all, much much safer especially in many of the places where it was, and still is, so heavily marketed.

FIFTY YEARS LATER I am still checking labels for 'the mark of the Beast' - not 666 but Nestle. It is an absolute disgrace.

Despite heavy censure, WHO criticism and codes for ethical advertising of baby milk, they are still TO THIS DAY touting crap for babies in many, many countries - basically wherever and whenever they can get away with it - using highly manipulative language specifically designed to mislead, falsehoods (aka LIES) and are even violating their own nutritional guidelines in some countries.
Just google 'Nestle baby formula scandal' or something similar and you will read the whole sorry story in whatever trusted sources you prefer.

 

[Mo1959]

Isn’t rickets a vitamin C deficiency?

Is that not scurvy? Not sure.

I take supplements off and on but not convinced they do the slightest good apart from emptying my wallet!

 

[BoldonLad]

Is that not scurvy? Not sure.

I take supplements off and on but not convinced they do the slightest good apart from emptying my wallet!

You could be right, I may have failed

 

[KnittyNorah]

Isn’t rickets a vitamin C deficiency?

Isn’t vitamin D the one you get from sunlight?

Or have I failed my NVQ Nutrition?

Scurvy is Vit C deficiency, rickets def. Vit D.
All the advice about 'sun safety' doesn't help with Vit D deficiency because as usual some people take it to extremes and some people whose beliefs and cultures were developed in a very different climate and culture to this one, cover up a lot more as a matter of course and, while they would have got sufficient Vit D in the countries of the origination of those practices, don't get enough here - as most of us don't throughout the winter anyway.
You don't actually 'get' vit D from sunlight; sunlight lets your body synthesise it. Here's the NHS take on it.

 

[Blue Hills]

I started avoiding Nestle products like the plague when it came to my attention - sometime in the early 1970s - of their activities in promoting milk formulae for babies in third world countries - where the water supply to make it up was, course, often polluted and where people were - and still are - too damned poor to buy it, so are apt to over-dilute it . They are a terrible example of the evil - yes evil - that can result from the mantra of 'more profit at any cost'. I don't even particularly like babies - but heck I don't think it's the right and proper thing to do to go round actively promoting stuff that has already killed lots of them and will kill or damage many more. Not when, in most cases, the original substance is available and is cheaper, easier, better for baby and above all, much much safer especially in many of the places where it was, and still is, so heavily marketed.

FIFTY YEARS LATER I am still checking labels for 'the mark of the Beast' - not 666 but Nestle. It is an absolute disgrace.

Despite heavy censure, WHO criticism and codes for ethical advertising of baby milk, they are still TO THIS DAY touting crap for babies in many, many countries - basically wherever and whenever they can get away with it - using highly manipulative language specifically designed to mislead, falsehoods (aka LIES) and are even violating their own nutritional guidelines in some countries.
Just google 'Nestle baby formula scandal' or something similar and you will read the whole sorry story in whatever trusted sources you prefer.

yep I know all about that - I avoided nestles for years because of that - god knows how many babies they killed through their products being diluted with polluted water - plus others starved through cash being diverted to a pointless product.
I thought that - eventually - they had changed their ways with regard to THAT issue after years of outrage.
They haven't?
Will check out - from what you have said I fear they just have employed more PR.
Many of the responses of the industrialised food companies remind me of the oil industry and the fag makers - they know what their stuff is doing, and employ reasonable sounding words as part of a sophisticated multi-channel PR strategy to try to neutralise awareness and push away opposition. The food industry chap on the prog was a perfect example. Smooth and sophisticated as he was he didn't look very comfortable to me - seemed to have a lot of internal tension - or maybe I was overthinking it/overpeering at him and he just needed a good bowel movement, inhibited by the uber-processed stuff he'd been eating.

 

[BoldonLad]

Scurvy is Vit C deficiency, rickets def. Vit D.
All the advice about 'sun safety' doesn't help with Vit D deficiency because as usual some people take it to extremes and some people whose beliefs and cultures were developed in a very different climate and culture to this one, cover up a lot more as a matter of course and, while they would have got sufficient Vit D in the countries of the origination of those practices, don't get enough here - as most of us don't throughout the winter anyway.

Some people go to extremes? I would never have guessed that

 

[Randomnerd]

Hi Jim


I'd gone a wandering in the far Northwest of Scotland for a while
(and getting the farm ready to leave so I could go there)



I think you might mean this study ?

https://www.soilassociation.org/cau...i-report-ten-years-for-agroecology-in-europe/

IDDRI. That’s the one. Thanks @mudsticks. Nice to see you back

 

[Julia9054]

All the advice about 'sun safety' doesn't help with Vit D deficiency because as usual some people take it to extremes

And some of us have had skin cancer and need to take it to extremes. And wish we had taken it to extremes when we were younger and the damage to our dna was accumulating.
(I take a vit D supplement. Most of us should)

 

[winjim]

Isn’t rickets a vitamin C deficiency?

Isn’t vitamin D the one you get from sunlight?

Or have I failed my NVQ Nutrition?

Vit C deficiency causes scurvy but that's vanishingly rare these days. Vit D deficiency causes rickets in children and osteomalacia in adults. It's Vit D that we get from sunlight although much (most?) of the population is deficient by some measure so we really do rely on food fortification.

 

[winjim]

Scurvy is Vit C deficiency, rickets def. Vit D.
All the advice about 'sun safety' doesn't help with Vit D deficiency because as usual some people take it to extremes and some people whose beliefs and cultures were developed in a very different climate and culture to this one, cover up a lot more as a matter of course and, while they would have got sufficient Vit D in the countries of the origination of those practices, don't get enough here - as most of us don't throughout the winter anyway.
You don't actually 'get' vit D from sunlight; sunlight lets your body synthesise it. Here's the NHS take on it.

An indoor lifestyle, use of sunscreen, air pollution, obesity are all contributory factors to Vit D deficiency. We do synthesise it, so in fact it's really a hormone rather than a vitamin...

 

[KnittyNorah]

yep I know all about that - I avoided nestles for years because of that - god knows how many babies they killed through their products being diluted with polluted water - plus others starved through cash being diverted to a pointless product.
I thought that - eventually - they had changed their ways with regard to THAT issue after years of outrage.
They haven't?

They certainly hadn't by 2018. Their marketing strategy was designed to be appallingly, and very carefully, misleading in their most 'sophisticated' markets, and in their 'less' sophisticated markets they chopped and changed with ingredients, in one country using an ingredient that in other countries they advertised as being omitted 'for baby's good health'. In part of one region, they claimed their baby milk was healthier because it didn't contain vanilla flavouring (vanilla flavouring for a BABY?) and in another part of the same region, they sold vanilla flavoured baby milk ... some/a Nestle product/s in Hong Kong and/or Spain (can't remember which one and can't find the exact piece that I read, which BTW was in a major UK newspaper and not the Daily Wail) were advertised as being 'identical in structire' to human breast milk - which is of course a clear physiological, biological, manufacturing and production impossibility, as breast milk changes greatly throughout the duration of lactation.

No, they are still a bunch of lying murderers or accessories to murder, every single one of them, leaching on the burning desire of most mother to give what she thinks, or has been taught, or has been subjected to false advertising about , is the very best possible for her baby, as indoctrinated Nestle, which to this day is still global market leader in infant milk products.

Yes, we know that many babies - and some mothers - have their lives saved by modern baby formulae. We know that if modern baby formulae were not available, many mothers would be tied to the home for months, even years, at a time, unable to either move forward in a hard-fought-for career, or to earn a little extra money outside the home to care for the rest of the family. But no-one should believe they 'ought' to be feeding their newborn baby junk which they have had to pay for with hard-to-come-by money. Vanilla flavouring! Sucrose! Why not just give the kid a Big Mac as a restorative shortly after it's born and be done with ...