“Americans are so bloody unhealthy. I saw so many fat people over there and they’re dropping dead”, to film a US version of his show Jamie’s School Dinners
Jamie Oliver (quoted in The Independent, 29th September).
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well”
Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own).
Marie Woolf in The Independent (30th March), Obesity kills more than 1,000 every year deprives us even of the excuse to reach for our cream-squelch éclairs for comfort: “Obesity is killing more than 1,100 people a year, and in five years has gone up by a third as a cause of death.
The number of people who died because they were obese rose from 762 in 1999 to 1,104 in 2003 in England and Wales – more than the number of people dying each year from the hospital superbug MRSA, according to figures released by the Department of Health.
The Tories said the figures showed obesity was now a ‘killer disease’ and called for a public awareness campaign similar to that used to highlight the dangers of HIV/Aids.
They urged the Government to carry out public advertising campaigns to persuade people to slim.
‘Obesity is rocketing in Britain and 1,000 people a day are passing over the threshold into clinical obesity. If these trends continue the future burden on the health service is going to be unthinkable,’ said Chris Grayling, the Conservatives’ health spokesman.
At least 21 per cent of people in England and Wales are clinically obese and there has been a huge rise in incidence of diabetes, including in children. The number of children needing hospital treatment because of their weight has doubled in eight years, with one in 10 six-year-olds classified as significantly overweight”.
Another panic-mongering Tory leaflet on the way?
Mr Grayling at least has the virtue of not masking his true concern with a veneer of caring or hand-wringing over the poor spare-tyre carriers heading for an early grave. However, his assumption that we die of ignorance smacks of trademark “the great unwashed don’t know what’s good for them” Tory arrogance. Anyone who opens a newspaper, listens to the radio or watches television cannot fail to encounter dire warnings about the consequences of a generous girth. Not a smiling, jolly face in sight. Even if you skip the health pages in the manner of a smoker disregarding the warning on the packet the fashion updates or celebrity gossip will forcefully remind you of your shortcomings. If you are fat, you are branded inadequate, sub-human, invisible at best, verbally bullied, exposed to torment with no corner to cram your bulk in to hide.
Ms Woolf reiterates the figures in greater detail: “Figures released by Melanie Johnson, the Public Health Minister, in a parliamentary answer show obesity is now a cause of death in Britain. There were 1,104 deaths linked to obesity in 2003 – more than the 955 for patients who died from MRSA. The Office for National Statistics showed that obesity was the underlying cause of death for 219 people, and a contributory cause of death for 885 people.
In 1999, obesity was the underlying cause of death of 165 people and a contributory cause for 597 people.
Ms Johnson said that although obesity was not often listed on death certificates, ‘data on deaths where the underlying cause was certified as obesity or where this condition contributed to the death is collected’”.
Jeremy Laurance (The Independent, 15th April) provides an antidote to the hysteria infecting those who toss and turn in their beds over having put on half a kilo in his Health warning: don’t let the middle go over a metre: “A tape measure could be more important than a set of bathroom scales in helping people protect their health, doctors say.
People with a waist size greater than 39.37 inches (one metre) have a sharply increased risk of heart disease, diabetes and other conditions linked with obesity, according to a study published today in the British Medical Journal.
The one metre cut-off point could become a more important health measure than the existing body mass index (BMI), which defines obesity as a BMI over 30 and is harder to calculate”.
For once an informative article that does not exude disapproval from every carefully chosen adjective: “Excess weight around the stomach is more harmful than when deposited around other parts of the body, such as the legs and hips, and putting a simple limit of one metre on waist size could help people maintain a healthy lifestyle. The type of fat and where it accumulated is more important than the amount. Fat deposited under the skin, which wobbles and causes cellulite, is relatively unimportant.
Fat deposited deep inside the abdomen, which is seen in an expanding waist, secretes toxins into the blood stream, raises cholesterol and increases the body’s resistance to insulin, essential for controlling blood sugar. A rise in insulin means the pancreas has to produce more, which can damage other organs, such as the kidneys.
The problem is greatest in Britain among men. The typical British male has an apple shape, his stomach bulging over his trousers, aided by a diet of beer and chips. Women tend to the traditional pear shape as they age, with weight accumulating on hips and legs.
An apple shape is healthier than a pear shape, but women are increasing their waist sizes and turning from pears to apples, researchers say. The finding that the critical point for waist size is one metre applies equally to the sexes and is the best predictor of insulin resistance – the early warning sign of declining health affecting the heart, liver, kidneys and other vital organs.
No easy test for insulin resistance exists but researchers from the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden, have set out to devise one.
Guidelines suggest men with a waist size of more than 40 inches and women with waists over 35 inches are at higher risk. But the Swedish researchers found a cut off of one metre for both sexes was a better predictor of insulin resistance.
They measured insulin resistance in 2,746 male and female volunteers aged from 18 to 72, with a variety of body shapes, and waist sizes from 26 to 59 inches. The results showed that almost half of those with a waist greater than one metre were insulin-resistant”.
Although it does not make for cheerful reading over the toast and scrambled eggs, it stands out simply by sticking to a summary of the catalogued facts. Women, upon whom culture has placed the burden of constant anxiety over the figure, would not so easily be let off the hook as Sophie Goodchild’s piece in The Independent on Sunday (9th October), From pears to apples: women’s new shape puts them at risk illustrates: “Excessive drinking, lack of exercise and sugary foods are to blame for increasing numbers of British women changing body shape, which is putting them at risk of serious health problems.
Obesity experts will warn this week that the traditional pear-shaped female form, where weight is carried on the hips and thighs, is on the decline and women are turning apple-shaped – with growing beer bellies”.
Once again, at least Ms Goodchild did not fall prey to the temptation of spelling out (a temptation her counterparts in another, lower-brow rag oft-cited in this column would have no qualms about succumbing to) the sub-text, namely, that the price of our (partial) emancipation has been to erase the health and longevity benefits, which formerly compensated us for our second-class status. We cannot expect to live like the boys without paying the penalty. A return to more “feminine” contours would prove salutary: “Dr Ian Campbell, the [National Obesity] forum’s president, said many factors, including the Western world’s increasing reliance on private cars, were responsible for this worrying transformation and that even teenage girls were at risk. ‘We know that most women are pear-shaped which is less of a health concern,’ said the GP who is a specialist in weight management at the University Hospital in Nottingham. ‘But we are seeing women who are developing apple-shaped figures where they are putting on weight around the abdomen. This poses serious health risks’.
Body shape is generally defined by the main part of the body where fat is stored. Until now, most British women have fallen into the category of pear shape, in which fat is stored below the waistline on the hips, thighs and bottoms. In contrast, those who are ‘apples’ have relatively slim thighs and upper legs, flat bottoms but prominent stomachs.
Big bottoms and large thighs may be considered a curse by some British females but a study published earlier this year by researchers in Copenhagen concluded that pear-shaped figures have healthier types of fat than those who are apple-shaped.
The reason is that fat stored around the hips is more likely to produce adiponectin, a natural substance from fat cells which is associated with a reduced risk of heart disease. In contrast, abdominal fat tends to be more deeply stored. It drains directly into the liver and secretes fatty acids, hormones and proteins into the bloodstream.
The rates of obesity for women have risen from 18 per cent over a decade ago to 22 per cent in 2002 – just under a quarter of the population”.
Julie Wheldon (Daily Mail, 15th October) veers awkwardly between discouraging us from too serious a commitment to the opposite sex by uncovering one of the less obvious perils of cohabitation and pursuing the retrograde turn-the-clock-back, double standard-ridden agenda of her employers in Why live-in love is fattening: “Once her fridge was a fat-free zone.
But a single woman who has met the man of her dreams quickly gives her meals a makeover.
Out go low-fat yoghurts, lean cuts of poultry and stir fried vegetables for one.
In come hearty meals for two – with man-sized portions (and no doubt seconds) all round. And plenty of his favourite treats always in the cupboard.
Obesity experts say this is the reason women often gain weight once they move in with a man. They say men have higher energy needs and often do more exercise than women, which means they can eat more without piling on the pounds.
However, once mealtimes are shared, women tend to start eating the same amounts.
Indulgences that suddenly find their way into the weekly shop also put temptation in their way.
Not to mention all those romantic dinners for two in restaurants.
‘If you are eating with a partner the evening meal is a social event and it is no longer just filling a gap,’ said Dr David Haslam, of the National Obesity Forum.
‘You may eat more and maybe more extravagant stuff. Men are very bad for women really’.
Taking the pill may also add to the problem.
Writing in the medical journal The Lancet, he said: ‘Oral contraceptives could provide further physiological and social conditions conducive to weight gain; repeated pregnancies certainly do so’.
In Britain 3.5 million women take oral contraceptives and many gain around four pounds in the first three months. Dr Haslam said being in a relationship brought many benefits, but couples should examine their lifestyles and make changes for the sake of their health if necessary”.
Shock, horror, Ms Wheldon lapses into heresy with her radical proposition that happiness and the accumulation of a few kilos, far from being incompatible states of being might actually be causally linked: “A study in Scotland found men’s waistlines can grow from 37 to 44ins once they marry.
Married women were also bigger than their single counterparts. Their bustlines were especially generous in comparison, the study found.
The Scottish researchers suggested that contentment helped married women put on weight.
They then compounded the problem by feeding up their husbands.
Other research funded by the British Heart Foundation found a happy marriage can be good for the heart.
The study, by Professor Andrew Steptoe of University College London, found those in unhappy marriages showed more physical signs of stress.
They had higher blood pressure – a known trigger for heart attacks – than those in happy relationships”.
Far be it from me to dispute the risks that have become received wisdom within the medical profession (although received wisdom can too easily become rigid orthodoxy, a lazy repetition of textbook passages learned by rote without taking account of the possibility of variation, closing the mind to variations in individual case histories and a tendency to discount patient lifestyle accounts, particularly concerning exercise and normal blood pressure). It is not my intention to belittle or trivialise slow assassins of such as myself, the reduction in quality of life that follows on from the constriction of the arteries, the waste of human potential implied by premature demise. What I do object to is the intolerance, the disgust, the snap judgements, the hurt quite intentionally caused to those who fail to conform to an artificial standard (it is not arbitrary, working on the principle that what cannot be attained by all, what requires great expense as well as squanderous amounts of time and a certain genetic predisposition or inordinate resources of self-denial to achieve automatically qualifies as the ideal, rubbing our noses in our lesser-mortal standing), in most instances as a result of a conflation of social factors as opposed to a (n always presumed) absence of self-discipline. Given the constant denigration and disparagement we incur, very few of us indeed actively choose the pariah role we are assigned. We are never permitted to feel at ease in our skin.
Anushka Asthana writes about the archetypal Zivilisationskrankheit in The Observer (2nd October) on the subject of the recent WHO report, Preventing Chronic Diseases, a Vital Investment (in Diabetes Deaths to rise 25pc as obesity soars): “The number of deaths from diabetes will soar by 25 per cent in the next decade thanks to Britain’s escalating weight problem (…)
The extensive study says that 76 per cent of British men over the age of 30 and 69 per cent of women in the same age group are overweight. This compares to 65 per cent of men and 55 per cent of women in 1995.
It is predicted that the number of overweight people will increase in the next 10 years, fuelling the rise in diabetes which by 2015 will be killing 8,000 people per year more than it does now. There will also be a surge in other diseases such as heart disease and cancer.
Dr JoAnne Epping-Jordan, of the WHO’s department of chronic diseases and health promotion, said the estimates were ‘conservative’. ‘The rates of overweight people are rising quite quickly. We are measuring the numbers of people overweight because that is a major risk factor for diabetes and other chronic diseases. We want to highlight that one does not have to be obese – the risks start rising at a Body Mass Index (BMI) as low as 21,’ she said.
BMI is calculated by dividing weight in kilograms by height in metres squared. The normal range is 18.5 to 24.9, and you are obese if it is over 30. Headlines in Britain have tended to focus on obesity, but Epping-Jordan pointed to studies from the US that show a woman who is only just overweight has eight times the risk of developing diabetes of someone at an ideal weight. For men the risk is just over double”.
Underlying external factors are briefly alluded to: “[The report] presses governments, the food industry and even city planners to make changes. ‘It is vitally important for future generations that we wake up and pay attention to chronic diseases,’ said Epping-Jordan. ‘The purpose of the report is to make the case for urgent, local and national action’.
Charities in Britain last night urged the government to take notice. ‘These figures confirm our worst fears,’ said Simon O’Neill, director of care and policy at Diabetes UK. ‘Diabetes is serious and unless those who are diagnosed or in high-risk groups are getting the care and education they need, it could literally take years off people’s lives. We know that Type 2 diabetes is linked to being overweight, so people must be educated to eat a healthy diet and take up regular physical activity or the numbers will continue to rise at an alarming rate’”.
Julie Wheldon (Daily Mail, 11th October, Diabetics ‘five times more likely to have a stillborn baby’) on the Confidential Enquiry into Maternal and Child Health, points to another tragic effect of diabetes, this time on pregnancies. The data compiled pertained to England, Wales and Northern Ireland, comprising 2,500 babies born to women with diabetes during a year: “Women with diabetes are five times more likely to have a stillborn baby (…)
The biggest study of its kind also found that infants born to diabetic mothers were three times more likely to die within the first month of life”.
The heartbreak behind the numbers cannot be adequately conveyed, but left to the imagination: “Of those [2,500], 63 were stillbirths and 22 died before they were four weeks old. Another 100 were born with malformations such as heart defects.
Alongside women without diabetes, this represented a fivefold higher risk of stillbirth and nearly three times greater chance of dying in the first month of life”.
Poverty graphically exerts its baleful and devastating influence: “Of the women studied with Type 2 diabetes, half lived in deprived areas and half were from ethnic minorities.
Researchers did not look at the women’s weight but said it was common sense to assume obesity may play a part in some cases of Type 2 diabetes in pregnant women, given that it triggers cases within the wider population”.
One piece of news held out the tantalising prospect that fat is not exclusively doom, gloom and despair was chronicled in the Daily Mail, (17th October, unattributed) Can fat fight Alzheimer’s?: “A diet high in fat and low in carbohydrate could help combat the development of Alzheimer’s disease, say experts.
The combination appears to reduce deposits of a brain protein which plays a major role in the progress of the distressing condition.
However, the latest research contradicts previous studies which have shown that fatty diets and the resulting high cholesterol levels and obesity can increase the risk of Alzheimer’s.
More than 750,000 people in the UK have dementia and around 55 per cent of them are victims of Alzheimer’s.
In the latest study, mice were bred to develop Alzheimer’s were fed on a high-fat, low-carb ‘ketogenic diet’. Scientists found that amounts of the brain protein amyloid-beta were reduced in the mice on the ketogenic diet.
Deposits of amyloid-beta, called plaques, are laid down in the brains of those with Alzheimer’s. The deposits can interfere with the transmission of messages between cells and can eventually kill them”.
The team (led by Samuel Henderson from the research company Accera in the States with colleagues in Belgium) published its findings in the journal Nutrition and Metabolism: “Its editor Richard Feinman explained: ‘Most studies of the deleterious effects of fat have been done in the presence of high carbohydrate. If carbs are high, dietary fat is stored as body fat,’ he said.
When carbohydrates are very low and fat is high, compounds called ketone bodies are generated.
These could play a role in the reduction in amyloid-beta seen in the mice used in the study”.
That the populace is not as impervious to messages concerning eating habits as the likes of Mr Grayling would have us suppose became clear in a series of articles on a drop in the consumption of salt. Sean Poulter (Daily Mail, 30th September) in Salt sales fall as families heed health warnings serves as an example: “Families are turning their backs on salt as repeated health warnings take their toll.
Instead, they are using more fresh herbs and pepper to flavour their foods.
As a result, sales of salt have fallen by 13 per cent over the last five years.
The decline follows campaigns by the Government’s Food Standards Agency linking salt to high blood pressure and strokes.
Other campaigners have labelled it a poison, claiming it leads to more than 200,000 deaths a year.
Warnings such as these have put food manufacturers under pressure to cut salt levels in processed foods.
At the same time, families have cut down on their salt use at home, while switching to other, more exotic, ingredients”.
Indeed: “Since 2000, sales of all household salts – including cooking, table, rock and sea salt – have fallen from £23 million to £20 million.
Table salt was the worst affected, with sales down 15 per cent in the last two years.
By contrast, pepper sales have risen 55 per cent to £31 million since 2000 while sales of fresh herbs were up 124 per cent to £38 million. Mintel said the decline in salt sales would have been even more marked but for the fact that many families have turned to sea or rock salt, which have a lower sodium content and are seen as a more natural product”.
Jenny Hope’s companion piece on a document produced by the Medical Research Council Human Nutrition Research centre in Cambridge on the 50 per cent drop in salt intake, (Daily Mail, 4th October) in There’s not a grain of truth in sea salt being better for your health demonstrated the impact of the hype equating health with concepts of purity and naturalness: “Consumers are risking their health by switching to sea and rock salt in the mistaken belief that it is better for their blood pressure, say scientists.
(…)
Some shoppers, however, are buying more expensive forms of salt in the mistaken belief that they are healthier.
But Cambridge nutrition scientist Dr Susan Jebb said yesterday: ‘There is no nutritional benefit to sea salts. They all have the same amount of sodium’. The potassium chloride-based Lo Salt product was healthier, she added, but it did not help consumers reduce their taste for salt, which was the key to changing habits.
Research from consumer analysts Mintel showed 65 per cent of those using sea salt do so because they believe it is healthier than table or cooking salt, while 43 per cent of those choosing rock salt did so for health reasons”.
Apparently: “At present, adults consume an average of 9.5g of salt a day – far more than the Government target of 6g a day by 2010.
A reduction to that level would result in a 13 per cent drop in stroke cases and 10 per cent fall in heart disease, according to research.
Dr Jebb said some adults, particularly young men, were consuming more than 20g of salt a day by eating salt-rich processed foods.
The food industry was steadily cutting the amount of salt used in processed foods, by about 10 per cent a year”.
According to Fiona MacRae and Robin Yapp in The rasher of salt, (Daily Mail, 11th October) our sweet tooth is not the only danger to our well-being: “It may look more appetising than seawater. But having a bacon sandwich for breakfast is hardly better for your health.
A study has found that, gram for gram, bacon contains twice as much salt as the Atlantic Ocean.
And the brown sauce that is sometimes served with it is not far behind.
Many of Britain’s leading foods were named yesterday as being laden with salt, which can lead to high blood pressure, heart attacks and strokes.
Common foods we should be wary of (…) include sausages, crisps, tomato ketchup and salad cream.
Typically, sea water contains 2.5g of salt per 100g. Packets of back bacon, on sale in High Street supermarkets, contain 5.5g per 100g – more than double the amount.
Sausages are also oozing with salt – with the typical thick pork variety having 2.3g per 100g.
Salt-rich sauces include Heinz Tomato Ketchup, with 3.1g per 100g, Heinz Salad Cream (2.75) and Somerfield’s brown sauce (3g) (…)
The National Obesity Forum’s annual conference heard yesterday that our increasing reliance on processed foods means that most adults eat around 12g of salt a day – twice the recommended level.
Salt has also been linked to stomach cancer, osteoporosis and kidney problems. It is estimated that keeping to 6g per person would save 35,000 lives a year.
Professor MacGregor, chairman of the pressure group Consensus Action on Salt and Health, told delegates that salt is one of the hidden causes of obesity.
Calling for a ban on advertising salt-rich children’s foods, he said youngsters are caught in a vicious circle. They become addicted to salt-laden foods which make them feel thirsty, leading to them reaching for a calorie-laden soft drink. This causes them to pile on the pounds.
‘Salt is used by the food industry to make unpalatable foods edible at virtually no cost,’ he said.
‘This is particularly true of children’s processed foods.
‘In order to make them appealing to children, very high concentrations of salt are added’. He added that if Britons cut their salt intake to 6g a day, 6 billion fewer cans of soft drinks would be sold each year”.
Interestingly, the smugness of the better off in looking down their noses at their less fortunate compatriots is not justified. The cold sneer at the laziness and fecklessness of the lower orders will hopefully be wiped off their sanctimonious visages: “Middle-class children are just as likely to be obese as those from poorer homes, the conference heard.
Traditionally, children of poorer families have been more overweight.
But a 15-year study of more than 50,000 youngsters showed that this is no longer the case. With more parents leading busy lives, children in affluent homes are just as likely to be given cheaper convenience foods. Lead researcher Dr Peter Bundred, an expert in childhood obesity, said: ‘Obesity can affect anyone. In the late 80s and early 90s, we saw it most in the inner cities.
‘Middle-class children had a lower body mass index at the age of three.
‘But in 2003, there was absolutely no difference. All the three-year-olds were equally fat’.
Dr Bundred’s team from the University of Liverpool analysed health records in nearby Wirral.
In 1988, just 15 per cent of three-year-olds were overweight. By 2003, that figure had soared to 24 per cent”.
The share of responsibility on the part of manufacturers for the rubbish we have little option but to fill our shopping trolleys with is finally being acknowledged, as shown by Food giants ‘too slow to cut salt content’ (Daily Mail, 23rd September): “Food companies are not doing enough to reduce salt, sugar and fat in their products, according to a report yesterday.
Despite pledging last year to make food healthier amid concern about rising obesity, manufacturers have cut levels in just a small proportion of their ranges.
Salt has been reduced in just a third of products, while just 15 per cent of food had less fat and 10 per cent less sugar than a year ago.
Consumer and health groups said the findings of the survey, by industry body the Food and Drink Federation, showed firms were failing to live up to their words.
Last September, 20 companies – including Coca-Cola, Heinz, Kellogg’s, Unilever and Nestle – signed up to the Food and health Manifesto, a voluntary agreement containing seven key promises.
Which? Spokesman Miranda Watson said: ‘The industry continues to market foods high in sugar, fat and salt to children and confuses shoppers with misleading labels and claims. The food on our shelves still contains more sugar, fat and salt than we need’”.
The issue is hammered home: “Professor [Graham] McGregor, chairman of the health group Consensus Action on Salt and Health, said: ‘Much more needs to be done – the food industry is responsible for adding this salt to our food and it must also take responsibility for removing it’.
Gavin Neath, president of the federation and chairman of Unilever UK, said the time and effort that went into making changes should not be underestimated.
‘They have involved the reformulation of household brands worth many billions of pounds,’ he added”.
Anushka Asthana (The Observer, 9th October) promoted the theme to the front page in Ready meals harm nation’s health: “Britons are eating more ready meals than ever, with 31,000 extra packs being bought each month compared with a year ago (…)
The worst offenders are young, urban professional men who choose the quick-fix products for convenience. The majority do not look at the labelling on the package in spite of the fact that the meals are often high in saturated fat, salt and sugar. Teenage girls, those living in poor communities and the over-fifties are the other main groups who eat processed food.
In the last year more than £900 million was spent on ready meals, new figures released by the FSA reveal. The most popular are Italian pasta dishes, followed by traditional British and then Indian food.
In her first interview as chair of the FSA, Dame Deirdre Hutton told The Observer the country was split into ‘dietary ghettos’ and taking on the ready-meal culture was her primary aim”.
The industry remains reluctant to concede the slightest portion of blame (taking shelter behind the demand-driven argument): “Martin Paterson, deputy director-general of the Food and Drink Federation, said Hutton was ‘pushing at an open door’. He said the federation had carried out a survey of the 20 biggest brands including Heinz, Nestle and Kellogg’s, and 97 per cent of products (worth £33 billion in UK sales) would have full nutritional information by the end of 2006.
‘There have been changes to the composition of food – taking out salt, fat and sugar,’ he said. ‘But you can’t get away from the fact that, if you take sugar and fat out of a doughnut, it stops being a doughnut. It is dangerous to focus just on composition’”.
Asthana continued her contribution on the inside pages in Food watchdog targets ready meals: “She [Dame Hutton] added that poor diet contributed to 100,000 deaths a year and admitted that the problem was not evenly distributed across the country. Teenage girls, lower-income groups, men in their late twenties and early 30s, and the over-50s tended to have poorer diets. Many did not realise their diets were lacking in nutrition. Teenagers suffered from two extremes in eating, she said: ‘One is not eating enough and the other is being obese’. Very poor communities were another dietary ghetto, she added, with no access to fresh fruit and vegetables”.
Pontificating about our predilection for takeaways is all very well, but the inexorable decline in local greengrocer’s that has followed in the wake of supermarket expansion has left its mark on urban geography. My best friend Lorna lives in an area of Edinburgh (Polwarth) where first-time buyers might conceivably be able to acquire a property, but by the skin of their teeth. Kind enough to give me unlimited use of her spare room, she travels by bus to her 12-hour shifts operating the dialysis machines in the renal unit without a word of complaint. The nearest (modest) supermarket is a 15-minute walk (on the way back she has to struggle up several flights of stairs with carrier bags digging into her palms). Should she wish to purchase fresh fruit and vegetables, the somewhat closer corner shop is not an option as the selection on offer is not only extremely limited, but also unappetising with brown cauliflowers and wilted cabbages. However, should she be too exhausted to cook, she is spoiled for choice with two chippies, a Balti house, two Chinese and a greasy spoon for when she crawls back after a late shift for a pre-flop breakfast. This is a staunchly middle-class neighbourhood, not a sink estate.
According to Asthana’s investigation: “Young affluent men fell into a ghetto category because of their reliance on convenience food. Nearly 40 per cent of this group ate takeaways at least once a week (…) and one in eight don’t eat fruit and vegetables every week. Others (…) felt their diets were healthy, but failed to account for the high levels of salt, fat and sugar in the sauces and ready-made meals they bought.
Hutton said she would be focusing on reaching these ‘ghettos’ and that the long-term answer was in schools. She described a scheme she had visited in a Newham primary school in East London where children had a Jamie Oliver-esque scheme teaching them about food.
‘If I could wave a magic wand and do what I wanted tomorrow, it would be replicating exciting projects like that, because then you stop a generation of children from becoming overweight and unhealthy’.
The shorter-term answer is to get the industry to improve the healthiness of the food on offer. The FSA has already been successful with project Neptune, which has seen salt in sauces and soups reduced by 30 per cent in three years. ‘I think the industry are moving hugely,’ said Hutton. ‘We have 50 written commitments in industry on salt reduction’.
But Hutton admitted that salt was the easy one: ‘Salt is an additive, you can take it out, you don’t have to have it. Fat and sugar are tougher to crack, as they are often an integral part of food’.
The answer, she said, was not necessarily organic food: ‘I think the important thing is to get fresh fruit and vegetable rather than to worry about whether it is organic’. Hutton agreed with her predecessor, Sir John Krebs, saying that at the moment the ‘evidence does not exist’ to show that organic food is nutritionally superior”.
Zoë Williams (The Guardian, 11th October), in her excellent Fuss is a fat lot of good, attacked many of the preconceptions that have dominated the debate for far too long: “Nobody wants to be fat. Nobody wants anybody else to be fat. Politicians and medical professionals alike would like to see everybody un-fatter. On my Marxist days I like to think of this as a groundswell of subversive collective action – a playfully ironic protest in which we destroy consumerism by consuming so much that we cost more to keep alive than we’ll ever make. The coolest thing is that children are involved. Who said you could be too young for politics? But on other days I have to concede that it’s probably just because we eat too much by accident.
Dame Deirdre Hutton, chair of the Food Standards Agency, has delineated how these accidents happen. We eat too much processed food – most at risk are teenage girls, male city workers, ‘people in poorer communities’ (when did it become de trop to say ‘poor people’?) and the over-50s. Her first hurdle is to harry packaged-food manufacturers into making food healthier, or at least flagging up in big red letters how unhealthy it is.
Burger King told her where to stick it. (They want their customers to ‘take responsibility for their own health’ – how sweet. It makes me feel like they really respect me. Now I fancy a Whopper Junior). Others will be more cooperative, I feel sure, but this is a pointless battle. Processed food is sugar-, salt- and fat-loaded because it doesn’t taste nice otherwise; it’s been sitting around too long. Anyone who’s tried to have some fun with a two-day-old roast potato can vouch for this. Healthy processed food will always taste like self-denial; to get people eating well without feeling hard done by, they need fresh food.
How do you achieve this? Well, ‘male city workers’ are time-poor – to get them eating nutritious hotpots nightly, you need to supply them with a helpmeet: a wife, for instance, or – not wishing to gender-bias this – a good friend to stay at home and stew while they work. In other words, you’d need to reverse a trend of the past 50 years and bring back the doubly occupied single-income unit. That would be tricky, no?
‘People in poor communities’ are more straightforward – they would eat better if they had more money, thereby a) having more time for home-cooking, since they don’t have to work so hard; and b) not having to shop exclusively in Iceland. How do you make the poor less poor? With redistributive taxation. How amazingly unfashionable; I feel I’ve just offered you a spam sandwich.
To return to teenagers, they tend to be either undereating or overeating, largely for psychological reasons. You could reverse this by outlawing cultural images in which an unattainable body shape is presented as the norm, and strengthening their sense of self so that it extended beyond sexual objectification. That sounds hard as well.
It is so far unclear why the over-50s should be eating badly, but let’s imagine the erosion of the family unit has left people isolated, and home-cooking is an activity people rarely undertake alone (…). The answer would be to repeal the divorce laws so that people had to stay together, and somehow to reverse the trend wherein youth is idolised and older people, feeling disenfranchised, eat more biscuits. It’s an idea, but I don’t fancy your chances.
Obesity, in the end, is a function of social progress. To blame fat-loaded food is like blaming Bill Gates for the people who e-mail you when you’d rather they stopped in for a coffee. To try to reverse it with well-meant advice is like telling a Viking warrior to chill out about his masculinity. I say we bring back rationing. It might sound extreme, but given the alternatives it also sounds surprisingly manageable”.
Of course, rationing is not exactly viable in a consumer society that can only function by encouraging excess. The over-50s may be suffering from the deleterious effects of the drop in income that is the corollary of retirement and stingy pensions as well as an age-related reduction in mobility (not confined to the loss of physical fitness, but also fuelled by the fear of wandering the streets alone where the likelihood of being mugged as a soft target is sadly all too great). Ms Williams and myself part company when she becomes too categorical in her stance on the ingredients of the pre-packed dinners.
Further calls to tackle additives followed, such as in the Daily Mail’s (18th October, unattributed) I’ll take mine with 33 sugars: “Giving up sugar in your tea or coffee might be hardly worth the effort.
For the average person gets through 33 teaspoons a day, a study has found.
Most is hidden in processed foods, ensuring it is easy to go over the recommended limit of ten teaspoons a day.
The study of 3,500 Britons’ diets found that many had no idea how much sugar was in items such as baked beans and bread.
It found the average person consumed 132 grams of sugar a day.
Only six of those were stirred into tea or coffee”.
Sean Poulter, (Daily Mail, 10th October) in War on ready meals borrows from Asthana’s interview: “The Food Standards Agency wants reduced salt levels in processed foods because of a link to high blood pressure, strokes and heart attacks.
The organisation is also concerned about the amount of fat and sugar in the products, which are fuelling the obesity crisis.
A National Obesity Forum conference today will be told that heavy people could cut their risk of developing diabetes by half if they reduced their waist sizes by four inches.
Britons are eating more ready meals than ever, with the amount spent on them rising by 5 per cent a year to £900 million.
The new FSA chairman, Dame Deirdre Hutton, said processed food is a fact of life and families are not going to return to preparing a meal of meat and two vegetables.
She said: ‘We need to make it as healthy as possible. It is up to us to work with what people are doing – it is no good trying to take people back to some largely mythical golden age.
‘At the end of five years I want to see the trend in childhood obesity reversed. I want the ‘healthy option’ to be the mainstream option, and I want to get to the stage where people enjoy food more and worry about it less’.
The FSA is working on a food labelling regime that could see red warnings on the front of foods, including ready meals, which are high in fat, salt and sugar.
This classification regime will be used to block the advertising of foods such as burgers during children’s TV”. I wholeheartedly agree with Dame Hutton’s down-to-earth analysis of contemporary constraints, her refreshing honesty about the impossibility of banishing processed foods altogether (for the record, I avoid them like the plague, but then again I am lucky enough to have the Hungarian to boil me carrots, broccoli, green beans and Brussels sprouts on demand).
Poulter goes on: “The FSA’s stand will rattle supermarkets and food manufacturers. Relations with the industry, which insists there is no such thing as a bad food, only a bad diet, have become increasingly strained.
One result is that Burger King, owned by American venture capitalists, has pulled out of a voluntary initiative involving the FSA and the food industry to reduce salt levels in processed food.
The company is considering selling the ‘Enormous Omlette Sandwich’, a product recently launched in America.
Comprising two slices of cheese, two eggs and a sausage patty on a bun, it contains 740 calories and 4.9 grams of salt – almost the entire recommended daily ration for an adult”.
The response highlights the need for binding legislation on the contents of our food: “The FSA’s head of nutrition, Rosemary Hignett, said: ‘We are very disappointed by Burger King’s decision to abandon work on salt reduction. Any U-turn on such an important measure will have a negative impact on people’s diets’.
Burger King maintains it is up to customers to take responsibility for their food choices. However, the chain has introduced healthier choices, such as salads, while it has reduced salt levels in some products, such as its chicken bites”.
Maxine Frith in The Independent (10th October, Processed food makers resist salt reductions) shows that our laudable endeavours to listen to advice on salt are futile if we cannot avoid excess quantities in seemingly innocuous products: “While people are beginning to cut back on the amount of salt they add to their food or use in cooking, manufacturers are not doing enough to reduce the contents of their products, according to a report by the Food Standards Agency.
Industry chiefs have said they have already gone as far as they can in lowering salt levels, claiming that further reductions would affect taste and drive away customers.
But the FSA has challenged the industry to cut the salt content of processed products still further, setting a potential collision course between the Government and manufacturers.
Men currently eat an average of 11g and women 8g of salt a day. The Government has set a target of reducing intake to 6g a day within the next five years.
(…) One in four people eats a ready meal at least once a week and three-quarters of daily salt intake comes from the processed food, according to the FSA report.
Nearly half – 46 per cent of people – say they are trying to cut down on their salt intake since the FSA launched a high-profile campaign on the issue last year.
Sales of table salt have fallen by 10 per cent in the past 12 months, but only a third of adults look at the labels to check the salt content when buying processed food.
Deirdre Hutton, chair of the FSA, said: ‘It is a great first step that so many people now know that too much salt is bad for them and are cutting down on the amount they add to food.
‘In the past year, more food companies have started to reduce the amount of salt in processed foods, but we need more of them to do the same if we are to reach our goal of reducing the UK’s salt consumption to 6g by 2010’”.
Thankfully, some companies are willing to take action before having their arms twisted by law: “The supermarket giant Tesco has reduced the salt content in ready meals such as lasagne and chicken paella by more than 50 per cent.
Carolyn Bradley, commercial director of the company, said: ‘The challenge we face is to reduce salt and make Tesco products healthier, whilst continuing to meet customer expectations on taste, quality and price’”.
However: “Peter Sherrat, of the Salt Manufacturers Association, said: ‘No one has yet proved that cutting salt produces any long-term health benefits for the general population. The Government should surely be investing our money in solutions that are known to work’”.
In an accompanying article, Sarah Cassidy raised the question of children’s vulnerability in Turkey twizzler firm strikes back: “The company lambasted by the television chef Jamie Oliver for serving turkey twizzlers in schools hit back yesterday with a survey claiming that it s parents feeding their children junk food at home who are fuelling childhood obesity.
The school dinner provider Scolarest’s study, which showed that nearly half of children aged seven to 14 ate chocolate, cake, sweets or biscuits every day at home, attracted the ire of parents’ leaders. They said that it was ‘a bit rich’ for a company that makes millions out of school meals to blame parents for children’s eating habits, and urged school meal providers to have ‘a more grown-up debate about the issues’.
Margaret Morrisey, of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, argued that most parents ensured that their children ate a balanced diet.
‘The tendency to blame parents has got completely out of proportion,’ Mrs Morrisey said. ‘We all know there are some homes where perhaps the diet is not as nutritious as it could be, but the vast majority of parents ensure that children eat a balanced diet.
‘Children will never remember the vegetables they ate, but can always tell you all about the sweets and cakes they have eaten’.
The study said that many parents were failing to teach children healthy eating habits, and often let them help themselves to any food they wanted. The Scolarest healthy Eating Report 2005 found that children were more likely to survive on unhealthy snacks at home rather than sitting down to a freshly cooked meal.
Nearly half of the 800 seven-to-14-year-olds surveyed chose what they wanted to eat for breakfast, lunch or supper, and more than one third told researchers that they made their own breakfast or evening meal without supervision every day”.
The editorial (Twizzlers are hardly the worst of it) voiced some valid criticisms: “But if parents are not responsible, then who is? Of course, school dinners ought to be of a reasonable nutritional standard. And education authorities should not have pared spending on school meals down to the point they did. And schools should not have been allowed to install vending machines that encouraged unhealthy eating and drinking between meals. And school canteens should not have been offering chips with everything (or nothing) every day. And what Scolarest had on its menus should have been monitored more closely.
In the end, though, parents are responsible for what and how their children eat. It should not have taken Jamie Oliver and the full glare of television to discover the lamentable depths to which school food had sunk. There should have been an outcry on the part of parents and teachers long before. Schools can help foster healthy eating habits, but what children eat out of school is every bit as important. The disgrace is that there are children for whom the regular indigestion of Turkey Twizzlers at school was by no means the least nutritious aspect of their diet”.
What fond memory of childhood does not include some frivolity empty in nutritional terms, yet infinitely pleasurable? My Father recalls the shelves lined with jars of mixed boilings, which could be bought by the quarter, poured into a paper bag as he salivated in anticipation. I drool at the recollection of Barley Sugar Twists, Sherbet Fountains, Highland Toffee penny chews, Tiny Tots, Revels and all the assorted delights I once enjoyed (it is indeed a miracle that I have made it as far as my 40th year). Although the term “pester power” is a neologism, the phenomenon is as old as the sweetshop itself. Nowadays, children are bombarded with advertisements to an unprecedented degree. They are broadcast on dedicated channels, entire aisles are devoted to confectionery (not to mention the checkouts where sticky little fingers can grab a packet or two strategically as Daddy or Mummy don’t want the embarrassment of a scene in the queue) and it is therefore nonsense to decree that parents who allow themselves to be worn down by constant nagging are guilty of a personality defect. What is objectionable about slops being served up in the guise of school dinners is the institutional dimension. Schools are, ostensibly at least, supposed to promote the welfare of our precious offspring, not stuff them full of second-rate nosh as part of an economy drive.
Fiona MacRae (Daily Mail, 14th October) in Parents’ zeal for health food ‘makes children ill’ indicated that fanaticism in the opposite direction is every bit as unhelpful: “Diet-obsessed parents are bringing up children with a dangerous fixation with healthy eating, experts warned yesterday.
Youngsters are being pushed into eating only the ‘purest’ foods, creating eating disorders in children as young as nine.
Eating disorder expert Dr Steve Bratman said a growing number of youngsters are eating such a limited amount of sugar, fat, salt and artificial additives that they are in danger of seriously damaging their health.
Slavishly following such a strict diet, deficient in vital nutrients, can lead to stomach upsets, headaches, skin problems and irritable bowel syndrome.
In the most severe cases, sufferers can end up starving themselves to death. Last year, Dr Bratman, who coined the term orthorexia, warned that British adults were suffering from the condition”.
She quotes Dr Bratman further: “‘Interest in healthy food as opposed to a healthy or attractive weight creates an overreaction. The most important message is that extremes are unhealthy’”.
Moreover: “‘Like other eating disorders, the issue is with obsession,’ he said. ‘But what is unusual about orthorexia is that it is an obsession about improving your health’.
Dietary experts believe an obsession with diet in wider society (…) is at the heart of the problem.
Deanne Jade, of the National Eating Disorders Centre, said: ‘There is a lot of anxiety about weight and the drip-feed of messages about foods and health may mean children develop a distorted relationship with food and later develop an orthorexic way of eating.
‘We are living in the kind of society where we are asked to take control of ourselves – diet is always being evaluated due to this pressure’”.
Meanwhile, according to Dennis Rice and Rob Ludgate (The Mail on Sunday, 23rd October), in Coca-Cola’s secret plan to target children while they play on the internet, cynicism knows no bounds where profit margins are concerned: “Coca-Cola is secretly planning to boost sales among children by using mobile phones and the internet to plug its sugar-filled fizzy drinks.
The massive American firm is worried that sales are falling among children as they turn to healthier drinks such as fruit juice and water”.
A memo written after a meeting between Coca-Cola executives and AOL representatives had disturbing implications: “The corporate giants discussed a strategy for ‘reconnecting’ young people with Coke, which they no longer see as ‘cool’, according to the memo. Coke wants to use AOL to find new ways of reaching 12 to 15-year-olds ‘through their interests: music, computer games, football and extreme sports’.
The memo, written by an AOL employee, says that this age group sees Coke as old-fashioned and ‘something you would drink when you’re out with your parents’.
It adds: ‘The brand is seen as the drink of second choice. Coke wants this market to ‘love’ the brand again. They want Coke to be ‘cool’ again.
In Canada, Coke already offers children free mobile ringtones when they buy its drinks”.
The path of righteousness twists and turns so much that the most experienced orienteer would be left confused, as Sean Poulter (Daily Mail, 3rd March) discloses in Food labels that lie about fat, salt and sugar content: “Labels on a range of popular products, including pizza, biscuits and desserts, are hugely inaccurate, says a consumer watchdog.
Only seven per cent of the items checked in a Which? magazine survey actually contained the levels of fat, sugar and salt stated on the label.
The former Consumers’ Association says shoppers wanting to buy healthy foods are being ‘let down’ by the lack of nutritional information.
There are no specific laws governing the accuracy of information on food labels.
Legally, they need only show average nutrition values, which can be worked out in a number of ways and are thus not totally reliable.
Local government trading standards experts say a margin of error of 20 per cent is acceptable. Yet nearly one in five of the 570 ingredients listed across 70 different products tested by Which? fell outside these margins.
The magazine’s editor Malcolm Coles said yesterday: ‘Nutrition labels help people compare foods and make healthy choices but only if they’re accurate.
‘How can you trust what you’re eating when so many labels fall outside even the fairly generous margins of error?’”
Naturally (the whiff of class actions against the cigarette companies fresh in their nostrils), food giants are keen to stave off accusations of leading customers astray: “A spokesman for the Food and Drink Federation, which represents manufacturers, said, however: ‘Any suggestion that manufacturers set out to confuse consumers is just not true.
‘Nutrients such as fat and sugars come from a number of ingredients and their levels will vary for a number of reasons. In response to consumer demand, over 80 per cent of UK-produced, pre-packed foods voluntarily have nutritional labelling on packs.
‘This is substantially more than in any other EU countries’.
Nestle announced yesterday that it is to show the calorie content on the front of all its chocolate bars, yoghurts, pasta and cereal packets. The move is in response to growing pressure for clearer labelling from MPs, health campaigners and parents who are worried about obesity.
Millions of children are ignoring healthy-eating messages to spend £549 million a year on sweets, fizzy drinks and crisps on their way to and from school according to a survey for school meals provider Sodexho”.
Must we always chose abstinence to be able to sleep peacefully at night (and I am not talking indigestion tablets and heartburn here, merely the guilt trip factor)? Some hope was proffered burger addicts in the Daily Mail’s (27th September, unattributed), Could seaweed take the junk out of junk food?: “If the thought of giving up junk food is hard to stomach, hope could be at hand.
Just a dash of seaweed extract and that high-fat calorific hamburger could actually become good for you.
Scientists believe food high in fat and calories could be made healthier by adding the extract, known as alginate.
It could be used to increase the fibre content of pies, burgers, cakes and other high fat foods.
Scientists at Newcastle University said the extract could be a breakthrough in the battle to get Britain eating better. It would allow junkfood [sic] lovers to continue eating their favourite foods while enjoying the benefits usually found only in healthier choices.
They said the seaweed could be a valuable weapon in the battle against obesity, diabetes, heart problems and diseases such as bowel cancer.
Studies have shown that high-fibre diets, with plenty of wholemeal bread and fruit and vegetables, can help reduce the incidence of life-threatening diseases”.
This represents a pragmatic, as opposed to a fruitlessly moralising, approach to the matter: “[The paper in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition] explains the many benefits of alginate, a tasteless and odourless off-white coloured powder that is already used as a gelling agent in some foods.
Professor Jeff Pearson, a member of the research team, said: ‘We’re just not eating enough fibre, yet we need this to keep us healthy.
‘The problem is that a lot of people don’t enjoy many of the foods that are high in fibre, like fruit and vegetables.
‘Yet to consume the recommended daily amount of fibre they would have to eat a lot of these types of foods.
‘We believe it’s hard to change people’s habits and that the most practical solution is to improve the food they do eat.
‘With a burger, for example, you would simply remove some of the fat and replace it with the seaweed extract, which is an entirely natural product from a sustainable resource.
‘You’d have a healthier burger and it’s unlikely to taste any different.
‘This compound can also be added to any number of foods, such as synthetic creams and yoghurts. With pork pies, one of my favourite foods, it could replace the gelatine which usually covers the meat, as the seaweed extract has gelling properties too’.
Professor Pearson has already made loaves of bread containing the seaweed extract.
And colleagues who tried it claimed it definitely passed the taste test.
‘Bread is probably the best vehicle to reach the general population because most people eat it,’ he said.
‘Adding the seaweed extract could quadruple the amount of fibre in white bread’”.
Until the boffins can dish up the perfect filling for the sesame-sprinkled bun we can console ourselves that the recriminations heaped upon the most notorious of chains appear to have borne fruit (Daily Mail, 26th October, unattributed), A Big Mac and fries plus a calorie count, please: “McDonalds is to start displaying fat and calorie content on most food packaging, it said last night.
Icons and bar charts will show the products’ nutritional information.
Sodium, carbohydrate and protein content will also be displayed in what the firm described as a ‘first’ for the fast-food restaurant industry”.
In North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America the information will be available from 2006. Making its debut at the Winter Olympic Games in Torino in February, it will feature in more than 20,000 outlets by the end of the year: “The labels will use five icons to represent calories, protein, fat, carbohydrates and sodium.
They will also show how the product’s nutritional content relates to guideline daily amounts of each ingredient”.
Unfortunately: “Packaging used in short-term promotions will not be included. Neither will wrappers and containers used for more than one product”.
In passing, I would draw attention to evidence corroborating that the slick formulation “you are what you eat” is far from the whole story, as may be distilled from A good boss keeps your heart healthy (Daily Mail, 25th October, unattributed): “Low-fat diets and plenty of exercise are not the only ways to ward off heart trouble.
Having a fair-minded boss who takes the trouble to listen can also help, scientists have found.
A study of British male civil servants found those who felt they experienced ‘justice at work’ had almost a third lower chance of developing heart disease than those who believed they were unfairly treated.
The researchers looked at two questionnaires given to 6,442 male staff in 20 civil service departments in London in the 1980s.
The staff were given a score based on a self-reported ‘justice’ scale.
Scores were recorded over two phases, between 1985 and 1988, and 1989 and 1990. Recognised physical, social and psychological risk factors for heart disease were also measured.
The researchers then recorded cases of heart disease in the group between 1990 and 1999.
‘In men who perceived a high level of justice, the risk of incident coronary heart disease was 30 per cent lower than among those who perceived a low or intermediate level of justice,’ the researchers wrote in their report.
‘This finding was not accounted for by baseline factors such as age, ethnicity, marital status, educational attainment, socio-economic position, cholesterol level, obesity, hypertension, smoking, alcohol consumption, and physical activity’. An earlier study had shown that office workers had lower blood pressure on the days they worked with a supervisor they perceived as fair.
Staff felt a sense of justice when they believed their boss considered their viewpoint, shared information concerning decisions, and treated them fairly and honestly”. That’s me shafted then.
Returning to the next generation, the Daily Mail (18th October, unattributed) prophesied doom in War on child obesity ‘is being lost’: “The Government as failed to cut the numbers of obese children under the age of ten, said the Department for Work and Pensions.
Its study, Opportunity for All, showed that a string of targets used to monitor the progress in the battle against deprivation have been missed.
And the gap in quality of health and education between Britain’s richest and poorest groups is widening. The report sets out 60 indicators of social and economic poverty in England and Wales. It compared statistics from 1997 to 2003 to check how the Government is doing.
Out of the 60 indicators, 19 are not improving, including seven which are worsening and seven which are not getting any better.
The report has shown that the Government is failing to halt the expanding infant mortality rate gap between the richest and poorest families.
It is also failing to reduce the growing number of teens who are not in any form of education, employment or training – and it is struggling to close the ‘education gap’ for children in care” (my astute readers will no doubt already have noticed that only the title alludes to tubbiness).
The proliferation of niche entertainments has taken its toll, as highlighted in the Daily Mail’s (24th October, unattributed), Watching weekend TV ‘makes children fat’: “A child who watches more than four hours of weekend television is much more likely to become a fat adult, research shows.
Five-year-olds have a 28 per cent higher risk of becoming an obese adult if they spend eight hours at weekends glued to the screen.
The findings are worrying given that youngsters spend Saturday and Sunday mornings watching children’s shows. The University College London study looked at more than 8,000 people born in 1970 to assess the role of TV on [sic] obesity.
Researchers looked at youngsters’ weekend viewing habits at five, ten – when they recorded height and weight – and 30 years.
The study revealed that at age five the average TV viewing was 1.5 hours a day, although 40 per cent of the children watched more than two hours daily.
For each extra hour of weekend TV viewing above this two-hour threshold, the risk of obesity rose 7 per cent.
If over the weekend a child watched eight hours of TV instead of four, they would have a 28 per cent higher chance of being obese when aged 30″.
At primary, part of the discipline of learning to read and write was instilled by means of a compulsory diary complete with illustrations. We were expected to read aloud our entries in front of the class. Flicking through the pages from 1972, my interests revolved around television and play, the games of the latter inspired by the former. I was constantly outdoors, not just in the garden, but in the streets and playgrounds with my brother and my neighbours of a similar age. We did not have the distraction of computer games, nor did my Mother gnaw her fingernails down to the quick with anxiety that we might be abducted and murdered by paedophiles. We simply hurtled away from threatening characters on our scooters and we were so far beneath the contempt of the teenagers in their sinister huddles that they seldom acknowledged our existence, let alone bothered us. After Playschool from 3.30 to 4.00 (the arched, square and round windows were for babies, pah!), children’s the programmes kept us still long enough for us to be fed. How could we have suspected that Cheggers, Maggie Philbin and the Multi-Coloured Swap Shop on a Saturday morning could have heralded couch potato-hood?
Andrew Buncombe’s Obesity worries curb the Cookie Monster’s diet (The Independent, 11th April) extols the virtues of brainwashing them young: “The message is brought to you by the letters F, A and T and by the numbers one in three.
Alarmed at the rates of obesity among young people, the children’s programme Sesame Street is embarking on a drive to educate its audience about the benefits of healthy eating. As part of the project, some of the show’s favourite characters are getting nothing less than a makeover – Cookie Monster is going on a diet while Elmo has started professing a love for exercise.
The producers of Sesame Street, which kicks off its 36th season on public television in the US today, said each episode will now start with a health tip about nutrition, exercise, hygiene and rest. Dr Rosemarie Truglio, the show’s vice-president of research and education, said that the programme had long focused on emotional and physical health but that, given the rise in obesity, the producers were pushing the message about the need to have healthy food and participate in exercise.
As part of the project, Cookie Monster, who used to sing that ‘C is for Cookie’, will be telling viewers that biscuits are occasional treats. He now sings: ‘A cookie is sometimes food’. Producers deny that Cookie Monster has been placed on a diet. ‘We would never use the word diet with pre-schoolers,’ said a spokeswoman. But behind the makeover are depressing statistics on child health. Almost one in three children in the US is now overweight. Ironically for the makers of Sesame Street, one of the main reasons is that children spend too much time watching television”.
Chris Marritt sounded the alarm (Daily Mail, 2nd April) over the scandal of Cheap-as-chips school dinners: “A catering firm has boasted of spending just 24p per head on school meals – less than half the 50p pledged by Tony Blair this week.
Education bosses at Labour-run Sheffield City Council have threatened to cancel a contract with Serviceteam after a leaked memo revealed it was not spending its target figure of 43p per lunch.
Headed ‘Cheap As Chips’, the internal newsletter boasted how some managers had spent way below the council budget for every meal served and congratulated them on cutting costs”.
Although he was merely jumping on the bandwagon, I endorse Marritt’s indignation: “The memo emerged days after Jamie Oliver, the TV chef, won his battle to improve nutrition in school meals.
His campaign (…) forced the Prime Minister to promise £280 million to raise spending from just 37p per meal [less than the budget for prison meals] in some areas to an average of 50p.
The council’s acting member for education, Steve Jones, said he was seeking urgent talks with Serviceteam and warned the firm’s contract could be cancelled next year of the proper amount was not spent on meals.
‘It’s something that causes serious concern,’ he said.
‘At the moment we have got 43p for the ingredients of each meal in the contract.
‘If tat isn’t being spent, we need to look into things very carefully’”.
Even 43p sounds like a pittance: “The council’s education department insisted the prices quoted were a brief snapshot of costs and the average sum spent on ingredients for each school meal, which varied week by week, was 43p.
But in its newsletter, Serviceteam – which serves 135,000 diners each week across 90 per cent of the city’s schools – claimed the real average was 36p.
School kitchens across the city were given spending targets. For staff at primary schools in some of the most deprived areas, that meant serving dinners costing just 29p.
In some cases, schools were serving food costing even less, with children being handed meals which had cost just 24p per head.
The result was food so unappetizing that many secondary pupils went to buy a takeaway instead.
A typical school menu features meals such as fish, chips and peas followed by a chocolate cornflake bun or sausage roll, half a jacket potato and spaghetti hoops, with syrup sponge and custard for dessert.
Other pupils are served a cheese pinwheel, chips and coleslaw followed by jelly or sausage and baked bean casserole with rice then trifle.
Serviceteam insisted it was not aiming to produce meals ‘as cheaply as possible’. Mr Warren said: ‘The fact is in the first year of our contract we lost £600,000.
‘We’ve been working very hard to reduce that amount and I think our parent company Cleanaway takes the view that they would be happy for us just to break even. Our position has been improving year on year.
‘We are doing a great deal to promote healthy eating trends in Sheffield schools’.
Under its £6 million contract with the council, Serviceteam spends £2.15 million on ingredients for five million lunches a year.
The remainder goes on administration, wages and transport costs”.
Graeme Wilson, in Kelly’s junk food war (Daily Mail, 29th September), verified that the Government was paying heed to parents’ anger: “Burgers, fizzy drinks and sweets will be banned from canteens and vending machines from next September, Ruth Kelly pledged yesterday.
In her speech to the [Labour Party] conference, the Education Secretary promised to tackle the ’scandal’ of junk food in schools.
Laws will be passed to set maximum levels of salt, sugar and fat in meals and schools will be given detailed lists of which foods are banned and which are acceptable.
Restrictions will mean some foods – including chips and sugary puddings – will only be served once a week.
Headteachers may even be asked to issue guidance to parents on what to give children in packed lunches.
The crackdown will be enforced by school inspectors who will be asked to check that pupils are getting healthy food.
However, teachers leaders criticised the plans last night.
They warned that schools did not have enough money to provide the high quality food ministers were demanding and said many children would just bring in junk food.
Critics pointed out that before the election Labour had ruled out a ban on junk food in schools, but executed a U-turn in the face of public anger after Jamie Oliver’s TV expose, Jamie’s School Dinners.
The TV chef expressed outrage that schools were only spending 37p per pupil on the ingredients for the average school meal.
As a result of his campaign, Miss Kelly promised schools an extra £280 million to spend on kitchens and better ingredients. She said then that the new money would mean primary schools having 50p per meal, and secondaries 60p”.
The resulting pledge was admirable in many respects, although a total ban on snacks is erring too far on the side of caution for my tastes: “Miss Kelly told delegates: ‘I am absolutely clear – the scandal of junk food served every day in school canteens must end. So today I can announce that we will ban cheap processed bangers and burgers being served in schools from next September.
‘And because children need healthy options throughout the school day, I can also announce that from next September no school will be able to have vending machines selling crisps, chocolates and sugary fizzy drinks’”.
Her proposal: “In future, pupils will be served meals based around good quality meat and vegetables, pasta and fruit.
The only drinks available will be water, milk, pure fruit juice or low-sugar drinks”.
The tough stance was not greeted with undiluted enthusiasm across the board, as recorded in Ben Russell’s Sugary and salty foods to be banned in schools (The Independent, 29th September): “Mick Brookes, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said children would simply bring junk food in packed lunches. ‘School leaders are heartily sick of having initiative after initiative foisted upon them and then having to allocate the funding and resources from the bottom of a barrel that has, in many cases, already been scraped clean,’ he said.
‘We wholeheartedly support healthy schools programmes…But to expect schools to provide a quality meal for less than the price of the cheapest unhealthy burger does not stand up to serious scrutiny’”.
Likewise, locking the gates, part of the plan touched upon by Sarah Harris in Pupils may be kept in at lunch to stop them buying chips, (Daily Mail, 4th October), constitutes an infringement of basic rights and is entirely unacceptable: “Pupils could be stopped from leaving school at lunchtimes to prevent them visiting chip shops and fast food restaurants, it emerged yesterday.
The proposal, outlined by Education Secretary Ruth Kelly, is among a range of measures aimed at improving healthy eating among children.
Other suggestions include telling parents what to put in packed lunches and teaching pupils how to cook healthy meals.
The report, by the Government’s school meals review panel, follows last week’s pledge to ban burgers, fizzy drinks and sweets from canteens and vending machines.
It came as Mrs Kelly revealed the results of a Food Standards Agency survey of pupils’ eating habits that showed half chose burgers and chips. Only 2 per cent chose fruit.
But heads warned that schools would not have enough money to implement the plans.
Most schools used to keep pupils on the premises during all breaks, until a change in teachers’ pay and conditions in the late 1980s forced heads to have to pay staff for lunchtime supervision.
Rising costs meant many had little option but to allow pupils to leave the premises. But heads are now being urged to develop ‘whole school’ food policies covering food brought into school by pupils and that bought outside during breaks.
A Department for Education and Skills consultation on plans is ‘inviting views on advice to parents on healthy lunch boxes or even imposing restrictions on pupils leaving school at lunchtime’”. Snooping into the contents of the lunch box makes my skin creep: how long until a Mars Bar is considered as grounds for calling in the social workers?
If budgetary allocations are stingy, progress will evade even the best-intentioned: “Ministers have allocated £230 million to improve school dinners but heads fear that is barely enough to change menus and upgrade facilities, let alone pay for more supervision”.
There is an unsavoury potential for reinforcing gender stereotypes inherent in calls to bring back cookery classes. Fair enough, as long as the boys are forced to tie on the apron strings alongside the girls and the girls are not excluded from what in my day were dubbed “Technical Studies”: “Other proposals made by the school meals review panel include giving pupils practical cooking lessons so they can learn about the importance of a balanced diet.
Home economics began to disappear as a subject with the launch of the national curriculum in 1988, becoming absorbed into ‘design and technology’ along with woodwork and metalwork.
Schools will also be forced to provide at least two portions of fruit and vegetables per child per day, oily fish on a regular basis and easy access to fresh drinking water by September next year”.
In the end, however, even a varied menu, including fresh fruit, vegetables and unsweetened yoghurt every day, such as my son has dolloped on to his tray is no failsafe guarantee that a child will tuck in. G simply does without twice a week. Even when he partakes of a few forkfuls, he and his friends mix both the items that do not meet with their approval and the leftovers in vile concoctions in his glass. The so-called “prawn cocktail” consisted of the unfortunate crustaceans (rejected because of the roe) floating in a soup of mayonnaise with green beans as aquatic plants (ceremoniously stirred with a half-eaten chicken drumstick), whilst the “Molotov cocktail” comprised curry, ketchup, gravy, mayonnaise, cordon bleu and bread.
Jenny Hope in Why a packed lunch may be the unhealthy option (Daily Mail, 6th October) did not offer reassurance to those seeking to avoid the pitfalls of canteen fry-ups by putting together a sandwich and a treat: “Pupils who eat a packed lunch have higher cholesterol and blood sugar levels than those opting for school dinners, say doctors.
A study published yesterday shows the general health of those who eat school meals regularly is no worse and may be slightly better than those who take food from home.
The gap could be even wider, however, as the research was carried out before many schools switched to healthier menus in the wake of Jamie Oliver’s TV series, Jamie’s School Dinners.
Concerned parents decided to provide packed lunches in the light of Oliver’s campaign, believing them to be a healthier option than school meals.
The study of 13 to 16-year-olds suggests they may have been wasting their time.
Doctors at St George’s Medical School in South London, a branch of the University of London, looked at the health of more than 1,000 pupils in England and Wales between 1998 and 2000.
Their finding (…) showed those who ate school dinners had lower levels of blood cholesterol, blood sugar and insulin – important risk markers for chronic disease – than those who brought lunch from home. They also found that leptin levels – a marker of body fatness – were lower in the school dinner group.
These differences remained the same even when taking into account other factors such as social class and levels of physical activity.
Levels of folates – found in oranges, strawberries, dark green leafy vegetables and beans – were, however, found to be generally lower among pupils eating school dinners. The researchers said more of these items should be included in school meals”.
Discernment is needed to resist the quick fix of the likes of Lunchables, the challenge for many that of scraping together fresh constituents that will not trigger an outbreak of salmonella come the lunch bell: “The finding appear to support moves by school governors to ban parents from filling lunchboxes with items such as Sunny Delight, Dairylea processed cheese, full-fat potato crisps and chocolate-covered cereal bars, all seen as unhealthy by nutritionists”.
The wider context must be addressed: “Professor [Peter] Whincup said: ‘Current efforts to improve the quality of school dinners are to be applauded. But to improve the diets of British children and adolescents we need to look beyond school dinners and address overall dietary patterns and their societal determinants’”.
D.J. Taylor in The Independent (11th April), stuck a pin in the sentimental bubble of nostalgia with his Is a return to family meals such a good thing?: “According to analysts from the Mintel Group, a long-term decline in one salient area of family existence has been reversed. After years of TV dinners and snacks wolfed on the run, researchers have identified a 5 per cent increase in the number of families who take the trouble to sit down and eat together.
It hardly needs saying that, at a time when the teaching profession laments that some five year-olds can barely hold a knife and fork, this development as been welcomed by childcare professionals. Dr Pat Spungin, who fronts the Raisingkids.co.uk website, has remarked that family mealtimes give parents and children a vital opportunity to talk. Dr Spungin’s own research, which suggested that a fifth of UK families could never find the time or the inclination to prepare a sit-down dinner, had prompted her to start a campaign for proper family meals. The neatly-laid table; the ellipse of raised, expectant faces; the serene hum of communal chatter: all this, it seems, is as much a prerequisite for the child’s successful nurture as a room of one’s own or Sats”.
He perfectly captures the atmosphere of the occasion: “My parents came from the generation that regarded communal meals as an institution more or less on a par with the Royal Family and the Church of England: sacrosanct, inviolable, tampered with at your peril.
Rather like the Simpsons, with their zealous routines of meatloaf nights and pork-chop suppers, they observed a painstaking regime of roasts and cold-meat-with-salads, that clearly derived from prescriptions yet more remote in time. My father, in fact, once admitted that, having praised a particularly succulent meat pie that my grandmother wrought upon him on the first occasion he had lunch at his prospective in-laws, he was forced to eat the same dish every Saturday until the wedding.
Just as meticulously enforced were the rituals: everyone present, no skiving upstairs on grounds of homework, departure prohibited until the plates had been cleared away. Woe betide anyone whose friend rang up while the main course was giving way to the dessert or the ingrate who wanted to relocate to the TV. As a child, I think I took the same view of these arrangements as I do now: thoroughly approving in principle while less enthusiastic in practice. The reason for this, I imagine, combines instinct and sociology.
One of the great pleasures of leaving home and going to university, for children of my generation, was the collapse of the obligation to eat your meals with half-a-dozen other people in talkative attendance. Suddenly, aged 19, one could eat when one liked and, more important, where and with whom one wanted to eat it”.
Not for him the yearning for a bygone age: “The other explanation, ominously enough, lies in that innate and unconquerable English Puritanism. Even 30 years ago – the tocsin is far more insistent now – one heard a huge amount, sometimes in school textbooks, about those ‘civilised’ continentals, with their afternoon-long Sunday lunches, maman et les enfants all chattering amicably away over tureens of crayfish soup while the sun blazed over the distant vineyard and Napoleon the basset-hound loafed in the shade and so forth. Not only shocking Gallic self-indulgence, it seemed to me, but a waste of valuable time that could better be spent reading or writing, or going for a long walk, and all bound up in a kind of pageantry that the functional business of eating doesn’t seem to need”.
Not that the Daily Mail would concur, as proven by You are who you eat with (3rd November): “Children who share meals with their parents keep the healthier lifestyle in later years, according to scientists.
Teenagers who eat round the family table are less likely to be overweight than those who eat in front of the TV. And they are less likely to crave junk-food snacks.
Australian researchers found ‘positive eating experiences contribute to a positive attitude towards food in later years’. But surveys in Britain have shown that just 15 per cent of families eat together every day”.
Tim Luckhurst championed common sense in his Children need exercise…not health food, (Scottish Daily Mail, 31st October): “If the comedy series Little Britain cherished accuracy as much as humour, the repulsive Vicky Pollard would be Scottish. Ignorant adolescents are common throughout the UK, but obese ones are most common here.
Scottish youngsters are among the fattest in the world. A recent NHS survey found that one in three 12-year-olds in Scotland is overweight – and one in five is clinically obese.
At 15, the obesity epidemic among Scots is much worse than in Europe and America.
So it would be easy to support Scotland’s most senior public health expert, Professor Phil Hanlon, who has asked ministers to consider forcing junk food manufacturers to print health warnings on their products – easy, but wrong.
Fat costs our NHS £500 million per year to treat and causes premature death and disease in thousands. But to imagine the solution lies in pious advertisements is to appeal directly to Holyrood’s adoration of gimmicky policies that achieve nothing.
If years of taxpayer-funded propaganda campaigns have taught Scotland anything, it is that talking about problems is no substitute for confronting them. Reducing the ranks of pale, waddling fat children in our schools will take more than another burst of sanctimony. The starting point must be to identify the real cause.
Scots who lived through wartime rationing can still recall their longing for the types of food that are now deemed to be dangerous.
Those born in the 1930s and 1940s craved bread, chocolate, eggs and meat with a desperation their grandchildren cannot comprehend. Although healthy options such as cod liver oil and orange juice were available, few wartime mothers fed them to their children.
Similar reluctance typified the national attitude towards vegetables. Though these were plentiful and not rationed, Government surveys showed few families ate greens more than once a fortnight.
Almost without exception, Scots looked forward to fatty foods. When ration books were withdrawn in 1954, many immediately adopted high-calorie diets. Parents considered it their duty to increase their children’s calorie intake. Many had witnessed the sort of physique they aspired to.
(…) Most Scottish teenagers of the 1950s and 1960s were not fat either.
The reason was physical exercise. These generations easily burned off the high-calorie diets they consumed. Their everyday lives involved walking, cycling and physically demanding chores such as carrying coal or cutting firewood.
Even when life got easier, childhood health was maintained by an energetic regime of school sports and massive voluntary participation of after-school activities.
Last year, the Scottish Executive outlined a £24 million scheme to recruit 600 public servants to promote good health in schools. This year it is under increasing pressure from Labour and Liberal party members to adopt Professor Hanlon’s proposal and turn burger and chocolate wrappers into copies of cigarette packets.
It would achieve infinitely more by encouraging the nation’s children to use the energy they consume. Very few teenagers are instinctively attracted to steamed fish and roasted vegetables. Even with Jamie Oliver’s assistance, ministers will find it hard to persuade them to abandon convenience foods entirely.
But the Scottish Executive could take a few simple steps to reduce the girth of Scottish teenagers and make sure that a moment on the lips need not mean a lifetime on the hips.
Labour-dominated councils across Scotland are busily commissioning new school buildings under the private-public partnership system.
In virtually every case, these schools have minimal areas for physical education. Many have no playing fields at all.
At the same time, planning guidelines permit development on school playing fields and other recreational spaces. The Executive lacks the moral authority to warn children that being fat means entering a minefield of health risks, discomfort and embarrassment.
Its pretence to care about obesity is undermined by its willingness to let developers build on the football and rugby pitches, parks and athletics tracks on which previous generations of Scots kept in trim. A total ban on the sale and development of public sports pitches is dangerously overdue. It should have been implemented 20 years ago, before acres of playing fields were buried under concrete.
It could still be implemented now – and it could do immense good, but only if implemented in conjunction with new educational policies.
The health and safety protocols governing school sport in Scotland have become so absurdly restrictive that it takes a very brave teacher to dare to organise competitive games.
Even where schools are willing to make the effort, the number of teachers prepared to supervise extra-curricular activities is at a historic low.
Organising sport is no longer a compulsory element of teachers’ jobs. It is only at expensive private schools that children spend at least one weekday evening and Saturday morning playing sport.
At the majority of Scottish schools, most pupils can limit their physical activity to gentle PE classes. Many avoid even that modicum of exertion.
Tackling childhood obesity means making regular, strenuous physical activity a core part of the school curriculum from primary one right through to age 16. It means making after-school and weekend sport compulsory. Before Scottish children were fat, few pupils left school without experiencing regular participation in team sports, athletics and cross-country runs. Parents and teachers shared the view that rough-and-tumble sports were a key part of growing up”.
Teasing does leave deep psychological scars. At gym lessons we were supposed to absorb the rules of team sports by osmosis. They were certainly never once explained to me. At sports I was a failure, left out, the last to be assigned and only then following an emphatic pantomime of reluctance. Consequently I never warmed to netball, hockey and the like. Mr Luckhurst is seriously mistaken if he believes that children do not routinely compare themselves with one other and that the pressure on them to capitulate to the cult of slimness has remotely eased: “Teachers delude themselves that embarrassment on the sports pitch will harm overweight children. But there is a big difference between bullying and simple exposure to the difference between a healthy body and an unhealthy one.
It is impossible to know how many young Scots were once persuaded to lose weight by contrasting their flab with their toned peers – but in view of the current obesity crisis, it is cruel to maintain the pretence that it did more harm than good”.
Skyrocketing property prices within cities will not exactly alleviate the pressure on viable sites of which Mr Luckhurst writes. With the introduction of league tables, which only attach importance to performance in academic subjects, there is little incentive to set aside multiple periods on the timetable for rugby or volleyball when more and more subjects are to be crammed into children’s heads. This is compounded by the rot of litigation culture. With random stabbings and shootings from passing cars it is little wonder that parents prefer to keep their sons and daughters under constant supervision in the home.
Jonathan Brocklebank and Georgina Balston penned a headline in the Scottish Daily Mail (31st October) giving full vent to the culture’s abhorrence of chubbies, Obese…and proud of it: “Scotland’s army of obese, junk-food addicted teenagers do not care about losing weight, disturbing research has found.
Overweight youngsters say there are ‘more important things to worry about’ than the obesity timebomb [sic] that the Scottish Executive is spending tens of millions of pounds trying to defuse.
The study of working-class children aged 13 and 14 shows many poke fun at attempts by their peers to slim, while few are worried about their body shape.
The alarming findings suggest campaigns to get teenagers to switch to healthy foods are falling on deaf ears.
They also help explain why children in Scotland are among the most overweight in the developed world”.
Instead of welcoming the acceptance these children have of their bodies and that they have not fallen victim to yo-yo dieting, the tone is sombre: “One Scottish child in three is overweight while one in five 12-year-olds is clinically obese, according to the latest official figures. That, say health experts, adds up to an obesity epidemic.
But the survey conducted by Wendy Wills, formerly a researcher at Edinburgh University, showed few of the teenagers asked about their obesity were worried about it. Academics who carried out the study questioned the children about the causes of obesity, the consequences of being overweight and their experiences of dieting.
During the interviews, many made fun of attempts by others to lose weight and described people obsessed with dieting as ‘annoying’.
The conclusions of the survey suggest that definitions of normal weight, overweight and obesity do not take account of the complexity of feelings that teenagers have about their bodies.
A group of 36 teenagers from deprived backgrounds across the east of Scotland were interviewed as part of the study.
The researchers will now interview the same number of children from middle-class backgrounds to compare their attitude to obesity.
Many of those interviewed by Miss Wills’ colleagues insisted that size was not important.
She said: ‘They couldn’t understand who other children would go on about dieting and found it annoying.
‘They are very unsupportive of thinner people who think they are fat and who would miss school dinners in a bid to lose weight’.
The report states: ‘People from working-class backgrounds have been reported as being more satisfied with their overweight bodies than their middle-class peers’.
However, it adds: ‘It is impossible to draw firm conclusions about the importance of social class without comparison with young people from higher socio-economic groups.
‘Whereas middle-class teenagers may value thinness and therefore hold negative attitudes to overweight-obesity, young teenagers from working-class backgrounds may value bodies that are simply free from illness and capable of performing everyday activities’.
However, some overweight or obese boys in the study said they valued being able to run about with their friends and were unhappy when their weight slowed them down”.
Persecuting the flabby has become the default setting, the terminology and practice of diversity, mutual respect and acceptance confined to promoting racial harmony: “Public health adviser Dr Donna MacKinnon said yesterday: ‘From a health perspective, we are concerned for the future of these young people.
‘We have to address health issues without damaging their self-esteem and we have to be careful about generalising that all young people are unhappy with their image.
‘Just because someone has weight problems doesn’t automatically mean they have confidence issues’”.
In our back garden in P, we have a rhubarb patch, which fascinated me as a child, although I never did train myself to acquire a taste for the red stalks (too sour and fibrous, even after being soaked overnight). I didn’t know what asparagus was since it was not on sale in the greengrocer’s or indeed the supermarket when I was growing up (on the fruit front, kiwis, mangoes and star fruits were equally unknown). Swedes, yes, artichokes, no. Just because the seductive purple gloss of aubergines and the speckled skin of courgettes were unfamiliar to me doesn’t mean that I didn’t eat vegetables. I hated tomatoes until I was about 14, but in my maturity I can’t resist them. Robin Yapp’s patronising The children who don’t know chips are from potatoes, (Daily Mail, 7th November) forgets that most children are brought up in a paved city environment with no access to fields or farms. When they come into contact with pork chops and milk in cartons, they do not necessarily make the connection between the udder and the liquid poured over the cornflakes. Whereas I lament that the transmission of basic facts has been neglected, the subtext of snobbery is execrable: “They are a staple part of countless children’s daily diets.
But, incredibly, more than one in three youngsters don’t know that chips come from potatoes.
Instead, almost a tenth of those asked thought they were made of oil, while others bizarrely believed they came from eggs, flour or apples.
Children’s shocking ignorance of food was discovered in a poll of 1,000 pupils aged between eight and 14 by the British Heart Foundation.
The results back up the findings of the award-winning Channel 4 series, Jamie’s School Dinners.
In it, a group of children were left flummoxed when asked by the celebrity chef to identify various fruits and vegetables.
None seemed to recognise a leek or asparagus and one child even mistook a stick of rhubarb for an onion – yet they were all able to identify fast food chains from their corporate logos [children’s skills are directed towards enabling them to negotiate their surroundings successfully and therefore it is only logical that they should have no trouble in telling the difference between the golden M and Wimpey’s].
In the Heart Foundation Survey, 36 per cent of children claimed they did not know that chips were made from potatoes and a similar number didn’t realise cheese came from milk.
The results of the poll are released today at the launch of the Food4Thought campaign which aims to get children – particularly 11 and 12-year-olds – to think about what they are eating.
Peter Hollins, director general of the BHF, said: ‘It sends a shiver down my spine to discover that so many children don’t even know what chips are made of. Kids have lost touch with even the most basic foods and no longer understand what they are eating.
‘Banning foods or telling children not to eat them is not enough – we must engage children in understanding why certain foods are less healthy than others, and encourage them to become interested in what’s on their plate.
This campaign is about talking to children in their language and sparking their curiosity so that they think about what they eat and start demanding healthier options’”.
Rather then stuffy tut-tutting, simple enlightenment suffices to bring about improvement: “In his programme, Jamie Oliver demonstrated that children’s attitudes to food could be changed if they knew more about how it is produced.
During one show, a group of children were shown how chicken skin and mechanically reclaimed carcass scrapings were used to make chicken nuggets.
The youngsters then rejected the nuggets in favour of fresh chicken, which many of them would not have touched before.
The BHF campaign seeks to drive home the programme’s success with advertising hoardings showing the common ingredients in cheeseburgers, hot dogs and chicken nuggets.
The images of gristle, bones and connective tissue are obscured using a ‘censored’ stamp – but the actual ingredients are revealed on the organisation’s website”.
Adults are faced with slightly different problems (Daily Mail, 27th September, unattributed) with Millions too scared to have lunch: “Millions of workers are too scared to take a lunch break, research revealed yesterday.
One in four British workers – about five million – feel pressurised to forego a full lunch hour because they are worried it gives a negative impression to colleagues and bosses.
Workers aged 45-54, or those on the first rungs of a career ladder aged 25 to 34, are most likely to skip lunch or take a short break. Nearly two thirds of Britain’s total workforce eat lunch in the office, including 72 per cent of media workers.
Health care staff take the shortest breaks of all – one in five take just 15 minutes to grab a bite at lunch time.
But the survey shows almost four million workers suffer heartburn after rushing lunch, and women are more likely to feel bloated after bolting their food than men.
Dr Robert Heading, a gastro-enterologist, said: ‘In general eating quickly or while on the go, combined with today’s work patterns and lifestyles, can affect our digestion and compromise overall wellbeing.
‘Few of us nowadays work 9-5 with an hour off for lunch, but grabbing a sandwich or chocolate bar and fizzy drink and consuming both in a hurry while trying to work at the same time risks heartburn and indigestion an hour later’.
Only workers aged 16-24 and those employed in finance or education regularly take their whole lunch break.
The survey of 2,064 workers was carried out by indigestion tablet firm Rennie, which is campaigning to bring back proper lunch hours’.
Under such circumstances, plumpness arises from to a desperation to keep hold of a job, to dodge relegation to the underclass rather than from some innate moral defect.
Rowan Pelling tackles the inconsistencies in the colourful spreads of the glossies dedicated to the idols of small and silver screen alike (Daily Mail, 30th October) in A society that thinks a jolly, overweight woman could be a bad mother has got serious body-image issues: “I am confused. Various media commentators had given me to understand that the vilest crime known to womankind was becoming too slender. Magazines slog it out in an endless competition to condemn the skinniest celebrities. Then, just as I thought the nation had agreed women could be any shape but pipe-cleaner, along comes rotund breakfast TV presenter Fern Britton snapped frolicking on a beach in a bikini.
Now, while it’s true that Gwyneth Paltrow could nest in one of Fern’s bra cups, I don’t understand the tirade of abuse that met the paparrazi pics of her splashing around in the sea. I would describe her as matronly, in the manner of traditional school dinner ladies, rather than obese. She looked vital, jolly and pretty and for a split second I thought Jennifer Aniston had found consolation at the doughnut counter. But her unrepentant exuberance was her undoing. Britton explained that she loathed dieting and refused to obsess about her health: ‘Do I want my kids to see me moping around depressed or frustrated? Wouldn’t it be better to be remembered as a jolly old soul?’
Apparently not. The commentators and diet industry denounced her as irresponsible for daring to be large and non-athletic while the mother of small children.
When did we become a nation of sanctimonious body fascists? Tubby people are often barred from adoption on health grounds – who says all fat people are going to have a short innings? Look at Queen Victoria – she looked like a barrel of beer for most of her life but managed to raise nine children and live to 81.
Nobody seems to care that thin people get cancer and cardiac conditions too. And who’s going to live longer: cocaine-smoker Kate Moss or pudding-loving Fern Britton with the chef husband?” So far, so good.
She hits the nail on the head: “I reckon the entire nation has contracted body dysmorphic disorder, because we can’t see women for the size they are any more, only for the size they are not”.
No matter how hard we try, the fault-finders will always find something to latch onto (and, ultimately, that is the whole point, God forbid that a woman should ever feel reconciled to her appearance, the diet, fashion and cosmetics industries would collapse if they could not glut parasitically on our fears of losing our culturally-defined assets): “If celebrities are confused, how do we mortal women on the high street feel? Damned if we’re fat, and condemned if we’re thin; exhorted to have beauty treatments, but labelled desperate and vain if we do so.
The perfect woman is a surgically un-enhanced size 12-14 with Kelly Brook’s breasts, J-Lo’s bottom, Elle Macpherson’s legs and Kylie’s waist, and no cellulite whatsoever. But even if she existed, you’d still find a photo caption in Heat that said, ‘Perfect woman in wrinkly elbow shocker’”.
Ciar Byrne’s (The Independent, 8th November) title Fed-up actress leads fightback against media obsession with ’skinny’ stars caught my eye, generating expectations of a willow-waisted beauty taking the side of the downtrodden and calling for her more amply-padded sisters to be granted air time. I was disappointed: “You can never be too rich or too thin, the old adage goes, but the celebrity magazines disagree, devoting acres of critical coverage to skinny models and actresses. It is an obsession that now threatens to land them in hot water.
The Hollywood actress Kate Hudson, daughter of Goldie Hawn, is taking legal action against five publications [including the Daily Mail] for publishing pictures of her accompanied by articles suggesting that she was suffering an eating disorder, which she denies”.
She instructed the London law firm Schillings to issue writs against the offenders: “Schillings said the images were ‘used to accompany and illustrate articles which suggested that she had an eating disorder that was so grave and serious that she was wasting away to the extreme concern of her mother and family’.
The law firm added that the pictures could also be ‘of commercial and artistic concern to those who might cast her in movies and choose to use her image to endorse products’.
Ms Hudson will argue in court that ‘the images in question gave a seriously false and misleading impression as to her true physical condition, in that she was portrayed as being dangerously thin with an eating disorder, which is contrary to the true position of her weight and diet being of a healthy nature, both at the time of the images being taken and at present’.
An analysis of how the photographs came to be taken, sold and published will form part of the case. Schillings will argue that the main image in question was stretched, making Ms Hudson appear thinner than she really is, although there is no suggestion that the photograph was altered deliberately”.
Sadly, jumping to the conclusion that the days of taunting the roly-poly are past, is not warranted: “Janice Turner, former editor of Real magazine, believes celebrity titles are targeting skinny women because it is no longer acceptable to criticise someone for being overweight.
She said: ‘They used to say so and so was a bit fat. They’ve realised it’s against the spirit of trying to overcome eating disorders, but they can say someone is thin. Readers love looking at other women’s bodies and comparing their own bodies to celebrities’ bodies.
It’s quite pleasing to see how unattractive it looks in reality when somebody is that thin. Readers will think, ‘I’ll have that other Twix bar, it doesn’t matter’.
But Ms Turner also believes that Heat and its rivals are lifting the lid on a dangerous trend that requires actresses to remain stick thin. ‘There is a demand for celebrities to be very thin if the camera puts 10 pounds on. There’s something really nasty going on in Hollywood,’ she said”.
The missive in the Daily Mail’s letters page (16th September) represents a cry of rebellion: “Renaissance women were adored for their fuller figures and were probably happier than today’s calorie-starved women. A low calorie intake reduces the body’s blood sugar levels to a point where the only result can be irritability, low spirits, lack of vital spark and ill health. Body and mind are far happier when well fed.
A woman who refuses to be bullied by today’s slim-image culture generally has a cheerful countenance (…)
Many of today’s (…) celebrities have lost their natural bonniness in an effort to be fashionable. Top models with their bony jawlines and skeletal bodies look too aggressive.
Mature men like mature women. Immature men, who seek adolescent-looking women, have elevated the super-slim look into fashion. I’ve never understood how, when making love, a man would prefer bones to flesh”.
Such refusals to apologise quickly attract censure, as encapsulated by Shoshannah McCarthy’s reply (Daily Mail, 23rd September): “I’m increasingly bewildered by the ever-growing ‘big is beautiful’ brigade. This overweight nation has spoken: apparently, men prefer larger, curvaceous women to the ‘calorie-starved’, flat-chested sacks of bones controlled only by their determination to be fashionable.
Self-esteem is important, and I’m pleased this has boosted the confidence of many larger women – but not so pleased for the forgotten victims.
I’m 20 years old and have always been naturally slim. I’ve never dieted and I eat until I’m full. I certainly don’t consider myself ‘calorie-starved’ or ‘skeletal’ any more than I consider my 28-year-old boyfriend ‘immature’. I’m fit and happy but I lack a curvaceous figure and I’m fairly flat-chested – as a consequence, it seems I’m branded undesirable.
Society treads carefully around larger people for fear of offending them, but my self-esteem as a slimmer woman doesn’t seem to matter at all.
Slim women are suffering unfair criticism and disregard while thousands are still crash-dieting. It doesn’t add up to me”.
Ms McCarthy feels slighted, yet when she walks down the street she is more likely to be wolf-whistled by the occupants of a passing car (an unacceptable form of harassment reducing a woman to sexual objecthood, but just this once I employ it for rhetorical purposes) than screamed at for being a “fat slag”. She will never be passed over for promotion or sent a letter turning down her application because of her weight. By far the bulk of column inches concentrate on excess flesh. Celebrities are worshipped and despised in equal measure. We daydream of what it would be like to lead their fairytale lives, yet we know deep down that we will die as anonymously as we have lived, lucky if we can afford a headstone to mark the plot in the local cemetery. Its writers know damn well that their readers seek temporary distraction from the boarded up windows and protective grills, from the bleep of the barcode reader. The faceless multitude is not sylphlike and swathed in Chanel. Shedding the pounds over the long-term is as likely as winning the Lottery. Sometimes we want to lash out at those paragons, knock them off their pedestal and the magazines cater for that base desire, that revenge fantasy. The culture is biased in favour of the McCarthy’s despite her self-pitying protestations. She should try on for size what the “sinners” have been forced to endure for their fall from grace.
The truth is far closer to that encountered by Joyce Withers (interviewed by Julia Stuart in The Independent on Sunday, 30th October), aged 57, who has been maligned for her weight since the days when she was bullied at school, called names like “fatty”. Needless to say, this severely eroded her confidence: “When I look back at those pictures I don’t see a very fat child. I see a child who was maybe just a bit chubby. My mother died when I was 15, but she accepted me and I don’t think she ever put any pressure on me to lose weight during that time”.
Mrs Withers contends daily with the assumptions of others: “I have absolutely no idea why I became overweight. The only thing I can think is that my grandmother was. It might be something hereditary. I have never eaten more than others and getting people to believe that is incredibly difficult. They think you’re lying or deluded”.
Not for her the thrill of the furtive first kiss when classmates are not looking: “Boys didn’t come into the equation as a teenager because I was about 15 or 16 stone. On my first serious diet – when I was about 16 or 17 – I got down to size 14, which was when I met my husband. But I couldn’t keep my weight down. By the time we married, when I was 20, I was about a size 20. I hated putting the weight back on. I’ve never been one of those people who are happy being overweight. I’m a size 28 at the moment.
My marriage broke down after 20 years. People always assume that when someone’s big that it’s the other partner who finished it. But it was a mutual decision and we’ve stayed friends. It was nothing to do with my weight. I don’t think I ever heard my ex-husband criticise my figure. In that time my weight ranged from 12 or 13 stone to 20. I lost two pregnancies”.
Keeping her weight down has been a never-ending struggle: “My weight has only ever come down when I’ve dieted very, very strictly. I’ve done all of them. Every decade the medical profession brings out something different. In the 1970s I did hospital starvation for two months and lost 18lbs. When I came out, I put it back on and more within six months. In the 1980s I took appetite suppressants which were very addictive. I didn’t feel myself and lasted only a few weeks. I didn’t lose any weight. In the 1990s I tried tablets that made fat pass through the body. That didn’t work for me because I’ve been a vegetarian since 1984 so I don’t eat fat as such. I’ve tried Atkins and that worked quite well. I lost four stone, two of which I’ve since put back on.
Prejudice against overweight people runs right across the board. I’ve been spat at in the street. People look at you in a judgemental way. It’s almost like they despise you. It’s not everybody, though. I always think of them as people whose own lives aren’t happy. Fatness is the last accepted prejudice. All the others have been addressed.
Some people judge us as lazy when often people who are big work harder to overcome that view. I’ve often stayed on after work because I didn’t want to be considered lazy.
The clothes industry is also prejudiced. I live in Salford, and there are only two shops in Manchester city centre where I can buy clothes. That makes me feel that I don’t belong in the city I live in”.
I can certainly relate to her longing to fit into clothes that others would snort at as huge: “I would love to be a size 14. Size 16 would do very nicely. Then I would be able to fit into everything that seems to be geared for people in that size bracket – public transport, cinema seats. I would be able to have a meal like everyone else and not be stared at. When choosing a car, you have to find one that fits you, rather than the car that you want to drive”.
Tahira Yaqoob details an instance of fat-bashing on a charter flight (Daily Mail, 20th October) in Fatties to the front: “Leaving the Canary Isles after two weeks of indulgence, passengers on board the Boeing 737 were no doubt a few pounds heavier than when they arrived.
What holidaymaker wouldn’t make the most of the plentiful fare on offer in the Tenerife sunshine?
But they were stunned when, according to passengers, the stewardess asked for eight fat people to move to the front of the plane as there was too much weight at the back.
The 235-seat aircraft was barely two-thirds full. Nevertheless, eight of the 151 holidaymakers duly scuttled to the front seats and the plane took off for Gatwick.
Twenty-four stone Peter Harrison, 52, who was on the Thomson-fly flight, stayed in his seat but said he felt awkward when the stewardess made her request.
‘I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,’ said the postman from Borehamwood, Hertfordshire.
‘The air hostess said the captain was not happy with the weight ratio of passengers at the back of the plane and then said, ‘Can eight fat people in the back of the plane in rows 31 to 42 move toward the front of the plane’.
‘She was staring straight at me the whole time she was speaking but as I was in row 26 with my family I didn’t move.
‘I cannot understand why she didn’t just ask for volunteers. The word fat did not need to be mentioned.
‘I can only assume she spoke without thinking through what she was saying.
‘The crew seemed in quite a hurry to get people to move along as the plane was already taxi-ing on the runway.
‘The people who moved got up of their own accord and changed seats pretty quickly – perhaps because they were embarrassed. As soon as they were buckled in, we took off’.
His wife Odette, 54, a care worker said: ‘The plane was only half full and they seemed to have checked in most of the passengers into seats at the back of the aircraft.
‘With hindsight they should have distributed the seats more evenly to save anyone any embarrassment’”.
The Thomsonfly spokesman was adamant in defence of the company: “He denied the stewardess had specifically asked for fat people and said all in-flight announcements were scripted”.
Workplace discrimination is becoming more overt. Andrew Gumbel furnishes us with the necessary background in his admirable Wal-Mart: Is this the worst company in the world? (The Independent, 2nd November): “There can be few chief executives in corporate America more uncomfortable at the moment than Lee Scott of Wal-Mart. Not that he should necessarily have our sympathy: his company, known affectionately as the Beast of Bentonville, after its corporate home, is the biggest single private employer in the United States. Its network of more than 3,500 discount retail stores has been lambasted repeatedly in recent years for its rock-bottom wages, which oblige thousands of its lower-end employees to resort to government subsistence, including food stamps, to make ends meet.
It has faced down critics for its reliance on sweat-shop labour, especially in China, to produce the goods with which it stocks its shelves. It has met community resistance to new store openings in many parts of the country because of its tendency to empty town centres of traditional family-owned businesses and foster suburban sprawl. It has been accused, in fact, of being the very emblem of everything that assails the modern American economy, as old-style manufacturing jobs are outsourced overseas and are replaced with low-wage, low-security service-sector work”.
Gumbel explains: “(…) Wal-Mart is an extraordinary phenomenon in American society. First because of its size: with more than 1.3 million employees and revenues of $285bn this year, it is larger than quite a few countries. And second because the very thing that makes it so attractive – low prices on everyday consumer goods – may be the very thing that is strangling the communities it serves.
The company denies this, of course, but a newly published academic paper argues in scientific fashion that Wal-Mart stores reduce employment by anywhere from 2 to 4 per cent and depress local wages by as much as 5 per cent.
What makes the paper so powerful is that its lead author, David Neumark of the Public Policy Institute of California, has been sceptical of union-led ‘living wage’ campaigns in the past”.
The firm has not been innocent of exporting its brand of ruthlessness to our shores: “[A] lower-profile approach has been employed at Asda, Wal-Mart’s British subsidiary, which has in large part avoided hitting the headlines, while attempting to import similarly controversial tactics into the UK. Asda managers, it is claimed, have adopted a softly-softly approach to marginalise unions under a so-called ‘chip-away’ strategy. One internal document proposes increasing employees’ productive time by cutting back on lavatory breaks, putting pressure on shop stewards to spend less time on union business and creating channels for communicating with employees without the involvement of the GMB general union. Asda has continued, nonetheless, to insist it is not anti-union.
Perhaps Asda’s most unpopular initiative, however, was to try to cut costs by withdrawing a Christmas discount offered to the group’s 140,000 employees. The supermarket chain was forced last week to reinstate most of the price cuts after a rebellion by staff. The acting general secretary of the GMB, Paul Kenny – together with a number of his members – contacted its bitter rival Tesco asking if it would honour the discount instead. Asda is desperately trying to take customers away from Tesco, which enjoys the lion’s share of the market”.
The retailer had energetically striven to ameliorate its image: “But all the careful public relations work was demolished by the leak of an internal memo last week which acknowledged some home truths about Wal-Mart – including the fact that 46 per cent of the children of company employees either had no health insurance or relied on emergency government programmes set up for the indigent and unemployed. The memo, written by Wal-mart’s executive vice-president for benefits in conjunction with the management consultants McKinsey, also showed the true purpose of rearranging the company’s health plan was to cut costs further.
Sure enough, close examination of the health plan revealed that, while monthly insurance payments were being lowered in some cases, they came with a hefty deductible that many company employees were unlikely to be able to afford. The memo went so far as to suggest adding a physical element to sedentary jobs to deter unhealthy people from applying”.
Katherine Griffiths in Fat? Over 40? Don’t bother applying for a Wal-Mart job (The Independent, 27th October) explores the topic further: “If you are on the wrong side of 40 and not as fit as you’d like to be, don’t bother applying for a job at Wal-Mart. That is the message for workers in America – revealed in a secret memo, laying out a plan by Wal-Mart to make it harder for older, less healthy people to get a job at one of its legions of stores in the US.
The memo, written by Wal-Mart’s vice-president in charge of benefits, says undesirable applicants could be discouraged by making physical activity part of the job, such as asking cashiers to demonstrate they are also able to collect trolleys. The tactics appear to be designed to drive down the bill for health care and other employee benefits at the company, which made $10bn (£5bn) in profits last year”.
The discrepancy between what its spin-doctors would like us to believe and actual policy is giddying: “Only this week, Wal-Mart announced a number of initiatives to make it seem like a more caring place to work. On Monday, the company published a speech by its chief executive, Lee Scott, urging Congress to raise the national minimum wage from $5.15 an hour. Mr Scott said Wal-Mart’s millions of customers were ’struggling to get by’ on their current earnings.
The company, which has more than 3,300 stores in the US alone, also said it would improve its environmental record, increasing the fuel efficiency of its fleet of trucks and investing $500m a year to cut greenhouse emissions and conserve energy.
In a third offensive, Wal-Mart said it would make improvements in an area where criticism of the company has been particularly heated: health care. To counter criticism that Wal-Mart’s benefits have been so poor that many of the workers – or ‘associates’ as the company calls them – have resorted to Medicaid to pay hospital bills, it launched a new, cheaper plan. The initiative allows its 1.3 million US employees to buy into a health insurance programme for as little as $11 a month.
Yet the reality of Wal-Mart’s attitude seems at odds with the positive impression the company had worked so hard to create. Susan Chambers, the Wal-Mart executive who prepared the memo with the consultants McKinsey, notes that Wal-Mart’s workers ‘are getting sicker than the national population, particularly in obesity-related diseases’.
To deal with this problem, Ms Chambers suggests various ways to woo younger workers and discourage older ones. ‘It will be far easier to retain a healthier workforce than it will be to change the behaviour in an existing one…These plans would also dissuade unhealthy people from coming to work at Wal-Mart,’ she writes in the document which was sent to the company’s board to consider”.
Jemima Lewis in What’s the point of picking on fat people? (The Independent, 29th October) chimed in with the chorus of criticism: “Wal-Mart is hard to love at the best of times, but now the world’s largest retailer has started picking on fat people. A company memo leaked this week revealed plans to introduce working practices specifically to make life uncomfortable for corpulent employees.
Susan Chambers, Wal-Mart’s executive vice-president in charge of benefits, wants to introduce an element of physical exertion into every employee’s working day – ‘e.g. all cashiers to do some cart-gathering’. Not a bad idea in itself, you might think: after a couple of hours on the checkout, lulled into catatonia by the bleeping of bar codes, it might be nice to stretch one’s legs on trolley duty.
But Ms Chambers is not in the business of niceness. She is a bean-counter. The rising cost of health insurance in America has led to a 15 per cent increase in employee benefits for Wal-Mart – a company famed for its stinginess. Since the overweight are more likely to require medical attention, Ms Chambers is keen to get shot of them. Not with time-consuming schemes to help them slim down, such as on-site gyms or healthy cafeterias; it is much simpler, as she explains in her memo, just to give them the cold shoulder.
(…)
There is a strange circularity at work here. The main reason for America’s obesity epidemic is the ubiquity of junk food – thanks, in part, to supermarket giants such as Wal-Mart. This food is (in calorific if not nutritional terms) dirt cheap, which means it is especially popular with the poor. And Wal-Mart employees are very likely to e poor: the average full-time member of staff earns just $17,500 a year – or £9,825.
It seems an extraordinary cheek to recruit from the underclass, pay underclass wages, and then grumble when your staff display the symptoms of the underclass.
Still, at least Wal-Mart’s policies are driven by straightforward profit. On this side of the Atlantic, it seems, anti-fattism is just as rife – and for no better reason than visceral prejudice.
A survey published last week by Personnel Today found that corporations routinely discriminate against the overweight. The magazine asked 2,000 ‘human resources professionals’ to choose between two equally qualified job applicants, one fat and the other of ‘normal weight’. A hefty 93 per cent chose the latter.
Nor were they remotely apologetic about this bigotry. On the contrary: around half justified it on the grounds that fat people lack self-discipline. More than one in 10 thought being overweight was a sackable offence, and 12 per cent said they would not want such a social pariah coming face to face with a client”.
Far from depicting this as an isolated aberration, she situates it within the wider culture: “A serious Sunday paper recently ran an admiring article on the rise of the ‘new puritans’: young people who have reacted against consumer culture by refusing to drink, smoke, buy big brands, take cheap flights, drive a fancy car – or get fat. Just like the corporations they despise, these anti-capitalist smuggy-pants regard weight as an indication of moral character.
‘There should be really skinny entrances to McDonald’s,’ suggested one waifish 26-year-old. ‘If you can’t fit through the door, that would be a pretty good indication that you shouldn’t go in at all’.
It is, of course, preferable to be slim: I do not know a single fat person who would argue otherwise. And, to some extent, our weight may indeed be shaped by character: comfort eating – like fanatical dieting – is usually the outward expression of inner sadness.
It is, in other words, an indicator of humanity. We all have our frailties: the trouble with fat people is that theirs are too visible. ‘Gluttony,’ as Orson Welles once mourned, ‘is not a secret vice’. The bulimics, the exercise junkies, the insomniacs, the Prozac-poppers, the new puritans – they can all keep their psychological crutches to themselves, at least at work.
Fat people may lack self-discipline in one particular area of their lives, but so does almost everyone. Would a woman who always falls for bastards, or a man who never gets round to doing the chores, be considered unfit for work? Picking on fat people is as pointless as it is unkind: you can’t get human resources without human failings”.
Janet Street-Porter sallied forth into the fray with Over 50, overweight and want a good job? Fat chance (The Independent on Sunday, 30th October): “As the battle in Cabinet raged over demonising smokers last week, it’s worth remembering that there’s one group of people in Britain who are truly reviled: the obese. One in five adults is considered obese, and the Government is so concerned about overweight children that directives about school meals and vending machines spew from the Department for Education and Skills.
Now a survey reveals that more than nine out of 10 bosses would choose to hire a thin person over a fat one, even when they’ve got similar qualifications. Fatties are so bad for business that one in 10 of these bosses said they wouldn’t want a large person to meet a client, and would even contemplate sacking a worker for being overweight. When 2,500 personnel officers were questioned, half of them thought the work of obese staff wouldn’t be up to the standard of other employees of ‘normal size’.
Doesn’t this confirm that, in spite of all the hot air and management-speak about objectives, targets, qualifications and people skills, many employers look only for people that are easy on the eye? Fatties are generally excluded from mainstream TV (…) apart from comedies such as The Vicar of Dibley and the early-morning sofa.
Apart from being fat, the other big disqualification to getting a job today is being old (I mean over 40). If you are seeking an executive position, being female is often a disadvantage, too. In fact, if you want to be completely unemployable today, you’d be an overweight smoker over 50, like Ken Clarke, or an overweight woman over 50; step forward Anne Widdecombe”.
She cut swathes through hypocrisy: “In the US, the huge retailing chain Wal-Mart (which owns Asda in the UK) has come under intense criticism because a secret memo revealed the company’s vice-president talked of ways to discourage overweight people and those over 40 from applying for jobs.
Wal-Mart is known as a mean employer, and this memo discussed how the company could drive down its bill for staff healthcare and benefits by discouraging unhealthy people from working there. The company made £5bn profit last year, and is trying to rebuild its image with PR initiatives. Although it is notorious for its low rates of pay, it had the cheek to ask Congress to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour, saying millions of its customers were ’struggling’ to make ends meet. It didn’t mention the fact that many of its workforce faced exactly the same problem.
But every political leader knows that to be seen as fat is a non-starter. So Tony Blair plays tennis, and Bill Clinton is like an evangelist with his post-heart op low-fat diet and daily golf. The truth is that being able to choose whether to be fat or thin is not an option for those coping in Britain on our pitiful minimum wage. Walk around any council estate in Sunderland or Manchester and almost every young girl is carrying rolls of excess fat. When you’ve got a poor education, no cooking skills and think nutrition is a cream you slap on your face, the idea of counting calories, choosing veg over frozen and cos lettuce over chips is a non-starter. Our minimum wage will buy a healthy diet, if you’ve got the knowledge to know what foods to buy – and the time to find them and prepare them.
Why not take a stroll down to the National Gallery and worship the acres of dimpled pink flesh that fill room after room in the new Rubens exhibition. Far from being unemployable, these chunky women were exactly the right shape to serve as models for goddesses, mythical heroines, royals and saints”.
The ever-incisive Zoë Williams in Weight of disapproval (The Guardian, 19th July) broached the question of how fat people are portrayed, a laudable attempt marred only by her self-conscious insistence on feeble puns: “You’d have to watch very little telly indeed not to have noticed the popularity of programmes about fat people. They fall into three (ahem) broad categories: the ‘uplifting’ programmes, in which fat people enlist the help of qualified fat-buster experts, and watch the excess weight fall off as they shun tastiness in favour of pulses; the ‘point and laugh’ programmes, in which celebrities or other derided individuals vie to see who can lose weight the fastest; and the freak shows, in which the morbidly obese eat everything they can see, or are fed liquid ice cream through a funnel by their feeder spouses, and everything proceeds inexorably to having to be craned through the window, a measure only undertaken by right-thinking people when they’ve bought a sofa that won’t go up their stairs.
These ideas only fit into the scheme of a satisfying narrative if we accept that ‘fat’ equates with ‘evil’. This is how fictive tropes deal with evil – they either give us redemption (oh, the weight loss! And do I see that former pizza guzzler crying over her nefarious past?); or they give us comic scorn, to neutralise the threat of evil; or they titillate us with disgust.
People talk a lot about the decline of moral absolutes in modern society, but I think we cleave very firmly to ideas of right and wrong; it’s just that the focus has shifted. It is right to be nice and slim; it is wrong to be fat. The ceaseless quest for the perfect diet (…) resembles, in the passion it inspires, the squabbles it engenders, the circular, self-governing logic each diet trumpets, nothing so much as the post-Reformation wrangles between religious sects. And now I think about it, a lot of those sects did contain similar injunctions against the vices of alcohol and rich sauces and suchlike. Maybe hellfire was just a red herring; maybe Calvin just didn’t like fat people”.
On Fat Actress, starring Kirstie Alley, Williams concludes: “And now a fat person comes out, not with a plaintive ‘respect me for who I am’, but with a trenchant and rather bad-tempered ‘you people are just stupid’. I think, in the business of body shape, it’s about as subversive a statement as you could make. Because it is stupid, the weight of disapproval we load on to people who are already carrying quite enough (I’ve got to stop making these dumb fatso gags). But without it, what are we left with? Hating litterbugs?”
In closing, I salute what some might snort at as an underhand ploy, but which to my mind is both intelligent and forgiving in the wilderness of overhang nightmares, as related by Sean Poulter in Topshop tops up its sizes to suit our new shapes, (Daily Mail, 27th September): “Fitting into a smaller size than you expected is the dedicated shopper’s dream.
Which is why Topshop has decided to be a little more generous with its customers.
Those who struggle to squeeze into a size 10 or 12 in other stores could find themselves pleasantly surprised in one of the fashion chain’s fitting rooms.
The company has admitted inflating these sizes to cater for British women’s ‘blossoming’ figures.
The firm’s top-selling fashions are wider around the waist, hips and bust than just three years ago.
The shift appears to have been a powerful psychological weapon in keeping customers happy and coming back.
While High Street rivals flounder in tough times, Topshop maintains its street cred with a loyal army of women of all ages.
Brand director Jane Shepherdson said the chain had been forced to change its sizing to reflect the fact that British girls and women have grown taller, wider and bustier.
‘We have to stock more of the popular sizes, which are tens and 12s. However they have got much bigger over the last three years,’ she told a BBC radio interviewer.
‘We have graded up our sizes.
‘It is well documented that women have got larger over the last few years.
‘Women don’t have small waists any more, they have bigger busts, we are fed more, we eat more nowadays, so we have to react to that’.
Psychologist and expert in consumer behaviour, Dr Joan Harvey, of the University of Newcastle, said the decision would help customers feel positive about Topshop.
‘Anything that makes people feel thinner – regardless of what the tape measure says – is a clever move,’ she said.
‘This tactic is very positive in terms of self-impression. Women who would normally be regarded as a 14 or 12 are delighted to find they can fit into something smaller. They are likely to keep coming back’.
The National Sizing Survey, published two years ago, found a remarkable change in body shapes over the last 50 years.
The 1950s wasp-waisted woman has filled out to become a more androgynous shape.
The average woman’s waist went up from 27.5in to 34in. Hips were 1.5in wider at 40.5in and the bust increased by the same amount to 38.5in. Women were also 1.5in taller at an average of 5ft 4in”.
