Who’s responsible for tackling obesity?

Years ago I was appalled to find that a friend’s mother was eating a high fat diet because she was diabetic and that was the recommendation at the time. That was at a time when the public was being told of the dangers of a high fat diet, particularly saturated fats.

Some carbohydrates such as starch are rapidly converted into glucose (the sugar in blood) as you say. Unrefined carbohydrates are much better, so many vegetables (avoid potatoes, which have a high starch content) and wholegrain/wholemeal carbohydrates are a better choice for those with diabetes or want to avoid this horrible disease.

Anyone with diabetes or pre-diabetes should be given dietary advice and I don’t think that will be to eat a high fat diet. There is a good case for making the public aware of the complications of poorly-controlled diabetes.

I agree that general dietary advice should encourage the public to seek specialist advice if they have a condition such as diabetes, where more specific advice is appropriate.

Wavechange,

you say “Years ago I was appalled to find that a friend’s mother was eating a high fat diet because she was diabetic and that was the recommendation at the time. That was at a time when the public was being told of the dangers of a high fat diet, particularly saturated fats.”

Why were you appalled? Did you appreciate the difference between the types of fats, and the differences between processed and unprocessed fats?

Butter and olive oil are fats, but allegedly quite good for you.

Massively processed fats in manufactured pastries, pies etc. may not be nearly as good for you.

Medical opinion keeps changing.
For instance, eggs keep going from being good to bad to good again as the understanding of cholesterol grows.
Red wine is good then bad then good.

Perhaps fats are about to become good again 🙂

littlegrey cat

I certainly know about different types of fats and have given some university lectures the topic. I have some knowledge of what is in foods but know little about the effect of consumption of different oils and fats on humans.

I am not sure that medical opinion is changing as frequently as you may think. The press and those who claim to know about diet select information so that they can present a news story or justify whatever they want to claim. There is a lot of misuse of science. It is difficult for the public to know what is best to do, and even with my scientific background I find it difficult to know what is best to eat or avoid.

One useful step forward was the discovery that trans-fats can be harmful when consumed in large amounts. These are produced when vegetable oils are solidified to produce fats. They can be identified as ‘hydrogenated vegetable oil’ in ingredient lists. Now that the problem is known, manufacturers have decreased or eliminated them from their products.

I would take some of the news stories about diet with a pinch of salt. Not too much, of course. 🙂

littlegrey cat

I realise that I did not answer your question. I was appalled by the recommendation that my friends mother should eat a high fat diet because of repeated warnings that this could lead to heart disease. She did not have any of the complications of diabetes but she did die of heart disease. Obviously that could have been coincidental but it was enough to encourage her obese son, who lived at home, to switch to a low fat diet and lose a lot of weight.

Wavechange

I think we may be in agreement here (ish).
If the diet you referred to above had a high percentage of trans fat then there was every cause for concern.
If it was just “high fat” then it could have been good.

I’ve just been reading some views on Ancel Keys which tends to reinforce the view that a lot of the populist “knowledge” about fats and diet is based on questionable analysis of questionable data.

What was that quote about lies, dmaned lies, and statistcs? 🙂

Baked beans are not junk food. 🙂
For vegetables, frozen is usually at least as healthy as fresh. The freezing preserves the vitamins at the time of picking. During shipping, storage and display “fresh” fruit and vegetables are deteriorating all the time.
Fresh vegetable and fruit should last several days, possibly a week or more.

So really perhaps you should get perishables from a better shop than your current local supermarket. We find our local Lidl and Aldi very good for fresh fruit and vegetables as well as being cheap.

Please don’t equate all packaged foods with being unhealthy.

I only refer to them as junk food, due to the high quantities of sugar and salt they contain. Maybe I should have just said unhealthy.

Garry,

simple or simplistic?

If someone already has a weight problem which has compromised their mobility, telling them “Simple, do more exercise” is neither a practical nor caring response.

One solution is to eat a diet which does not encourage you to eat big meals.

Another is to educate the people who are feeding these poor people.
Leaving aside the somewhat murky world of “feeders” and “gainers” most very obese people need someone to actively shop for them, prepare their meals, and feed them.

God knows why anyone would do this, but the only answer IMHO is education, education, education!

Garry, you may be interested in our guest post from CASH about the amount of salt in our foods; https://conversation.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/salt-awareness-week-salt-food-pizza-cash/

Hi Richard, we’ve written about active holidays before: https://conversation.which.co.uk/transport-travel/adventure-activity-adrenaline-holiday-beach-relaxation/

Hi Richard – it’s a really interesting area, and one which I fully support. I don’t like forking out money for a gym membership when I can get exercise by walking or cycling (if I’m brave enough – am a bit too scared to cycle in London). Also, I enjoy the feeling of getting somewhere, without having to sit in a stuffy tube.

As it’s primarily focused on health, I suspect research along the lines that you suggest would be best done by a health charity rather than Which? itself, although I like the idea of the test. If you’re interested, sustrans is a charity that focuses on encouraging more people to take up active travel, and it has collated some interesting research on the benefits etc, here: http://www.sustrans.org.uk/resources/research-and-monitoring/related-academic-research

Without any effort from the government our parents could have been drunks, heroin addicts, heavy smokers and criminals. Helping people to behave themselves without unnecessarily interfering with their lives is a delicate balance.

What has changed in the last 60 years is that most people can afford to buy more food than they need to eat, many of us have a more sedentary lifestyle, supermarkets sell an enormous amount of pre-prepared food, and using take-aways or eating out have become more common.

We don’t just need to educate children into healthy eating. Many adults need help too.

I’m fully in agreement with wavechange and Sophie here. What has also changed in my lifetime is that so much food today is much more appealing to the tastebuds, and the most appealing is usually the food that puts the weight on of course. I have noticed that a very wide range of breakfast and snack-type foods nowadays contain, or are coated in, chocolate, to make them more desirable no doubt. Chocolate, caramel and toffee flavours are finding their way into yoghurts and, although the amounts might be infinitessimal, it all contributes to and reinforces a “taste history” in the mind so that the cravings for chocolatey products are intensified. After viewing aTV programme recently about obese people we were wondering how they afford to eat the amounts they do – especially since the foods they were gorging on were generally quite expensive. We get fruit and veg at our local market every Friday; it is surprisingly cheap [compared to most supermarket prices] and lasts a week if properly stored and used sensibly. Smokers and drinkers are made to pay for their indulgences through taxation so they are subsidising the NHS. Over-eaters make no such contribution [except through the VAT on some of their foods]. Perhaps a waistband tax is called for with compulsory public weigh-ins in front of the town hall and the town crier announcing the results to the multitude. What happened to those ‘speak your weight’ weighing machines that used to be outside various shops, or did they only exist in the imagination of the saucy seaside postcard artists?

John is absolutely right about manufacturers making food more appealing and easy to eat.

Here’s an example. At one time, eating most nuts involved careful work with nutcrackers. Now you can buy bags and boxes of shelled nuts, making it easy to eat much larger quantities. Nuts, having a high oil/fat content will help enlarge the waistline.

Even foods that are regarded as more healthy options (e.g. muesli) are easy to eat in much greater quantities than we need.