Health experts blame passive overeating for global pandemic, warning in the Lancet that governments must tackle obesity now
\”Passive overeating\”.
What, you mean the pokers aren\’t putting the food into their own mouths? Digesting it to produce flobbling rolls of glutinous fat?
They\’re just absorbing the over-weightness from the passing air?
Swinburn\’s paper comes up with a clear primary culprit: a powerful global food industry \”which is producing more processed, affordable, and effectively-marketed food than ever before\”.
He said an \”increased supply of cheap, palatable, energy-dense foods\”, coupled with better distribution and marketing, had led to \”passive overconsumption\”.
Nutritious food, ever cheaper. The thing that all and every species has been searching for since that very first set of chemicals learnt how to copy themselves in the oceans of 3.5 billion years ago.
Twats.
Maybe passive overeating’s like passive smoking. If I order the supersize with extra fries the poor sod at the next table puts on another stone.
Tough.
I think I’ll have the pie & ice cream to finish.
something i’ve noticed is how obsessed many people are about food – they watch tv programs about it, read sunday supplements about it, give and receive food presents whenever they visit etc – obsessed, truly obsessed.
Some cunts that took away my king sized mars – they were just the right size for me – king sized snickers and a bag of cheese ‘n onion on the way into work – breakfast of champions, see a chap through to lunchtime.
more processed is not the same as nutritious
Tim adds: By definition if people are getting fat from the food then it’s packed with nutrition. Nutrition being the calories in food you see?
“more processed is not the same as nutritious”
Neither is it the inverse. They are separate things. Although less processed often implies “becomes non-nutritious quickly”, through the entirely natural processes of decomposition.
Compare very nice fresh bread from your local boulangerie, if you have one, which will be past the point of excellence by the next morning, with plastic white sliced from a UK supermarket, which will still be entirely edible in a week and suitable for toast until it starts going mouldy (or past that, if you’re not fussy.)
I’ll allow you that there might be a some nutritional advantage to the baguette (although less than from the plastic brown wholemeal sliced that sits next to our putative white loaf) but, for the mass of humanity, it is outweighed by the cost and endurance of the treated product.
“Nutrition being the calories in food you see?”
The calories are one component of nutrition – there are others. Fat, for example. Necessary for us (well, I think you can manage with oils) and definitely protein (enough variety to supply all the essential amino acids). And lots of minor stuff – much of which is raged against.
Remind me why “salary” has the same root as “salt”?
“Fat, for example. Necessary for us (well, I think you can manage with oils)”: when I was involved in Food Science, I was instructed that the difference between fat and oil was just the temperature at which the substance melted. Chemically they were the same family. Whether the words are still used in that sense I don’t know.
I bet that some 3.5 billion years ago, some single celled ancestor of these cretins, The Escherichia Puritani Bacteria, were floating around scolding their fellow single celled lifeforms for their choice of lifestyle.
These kinds of people have a hardon for wartime rationing.
From the article: “One study, by Claire Wang from Columbia University’s school of public health, uses British and American data to track the possible increase in obesity levels if governments continue with current policies.”
Surely that is assuming the current policies are to blame for the increase in obesity? The whole thing, especially the quote from David King, is a massive exercise in statism.
what the Hell does this have to do with the government? Government “advice” on what to eat changes with montonous regularity every few years. Remember when they told us how many potatoes of a certain shape and size we should eat each day?
A profile of Professor Swinburn at The Lancet contains the following quotation:
“To me, the underlying drivers that are promoting overconsumption of food, and its resulting obesity, have the same roots as those that drive our overconsumption of fossil fuels and the resulting greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.”
He says he was inspired by the campaign to raise taxes on tobacco in his native New Zealand.
Every day that goes past, the late Michael Wharton (aka Peter Simple) looks less like a satirist and more like a seer. Nostradamus couldn’t lay a glove on him.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. So much ignorance, and from so many. Briefly, and in order, then:
@blokeinspain and JohnnyBonk: Facetiousness apart, a diet mainly comprising pie, ice cream, snickers, and cheese’n’onion snacks will eventually kill you, and rot your teeth in the meantime. Down to you.
@Tim: “Nutrition being calories, you see.” No it isn’t. For example, refined cane sugar (white sugar to Europeans) is packed full of calories but has almost no nutritional value.
@surreptitious evil: Your post is misinformed. The difficulty with processed foods is twofold. First, processing usually removes food attributes that are desirable (especially fibre) and second processing often involves diluting foodstuffs with cheaper and less healthy ingredients (usually sugars or saturated fats).
However, I do take your points about the importance of balance in diet, and the popular (i.e. tabloid) “rage” against minor stuff.
@Gareth: Yes, the facts do show that wartime diet in the UK had a beneficial effect on the health of the British population. And your point is?
@Diogenes: You are quite wrong. Government adive on healthy eating has not varied for decades. That’s because there is no dispute on the subject, nationally or internationally. Of course the tabloids love to take things out of context and create scare stories, but I’m happy to prefer authoritative evidence over headlines in the Mail and the Express.
As for “passive eating” it’s completely obvious that the Professor was referring to the fact that generally speaking people are ignorant about their diet, and passively accept foodstuffs which are, in the end of the day, harmful to their health. By way of example, baked beans are full of sugar (which is why the kiddies love them) but the fact that they rot your teeth is seldom pointed out.
Tim adds:
“@Tim: “Nutrition being calories, you see.” No it isn’t. For example, refined cane sugar (white sugar to Europeans) is packed full of calories but has almost no nutritional value.”
This is nonsense.
“nu·tri·tionNoun/n(y)o?o?triSH?n/
1. The process of providing or obtaining the food necessary for health and growth.”
Calories are nutrition, given that they’re food necessary for health and growth. We could even do an experiment. You can have all the “nutrition” by your definition you want but no calories and I’ll have calories but none of your “nutrition” and we’ll see who lasts longest. The bloke on 2,000 calories a day of white sugar will last longer than the one on vitamin pills.
“@surreptitious evil: Your post is misinformed. The difficulty with processed foods is twofold. First, processing usually removes food attributes that are desirable (especially fibre) and second processing often involves diluting foodstuffs with cheaper and less healthy ingredients (usually sugars or saturated fats).”
And your comment is either trollish or aggressively ignorant.
Read my comment again (Tim posts here).
And I’ll challenge you – take a possibly (I’ll grant the fresh food facists that) slightly less overall nutritious processed food and a selection of wonderfully unprocessed organic delicatessen foods (most wonderfully appreciated deli foods are processed by smoking, pickling or other ancien methods.)
Wait two weeks without refrigeration (a luxury of the modern industrialised world.)
I’ll eat the modern crap. You bring yourself to eat the decomposing deliquescent remains of your expensive indulgence.
Tim’s addition to your comment has another angle on why you are quite as wrong as you are.
@ Surreptitious Evil: I’m sorry if you found my post aggressive. Perhaps it was. But I still can’t see why both you and Tim found my objection to his assertion that calories and nutrition are the same thing to be “nonsense”. A calorie is a unit of heat. Whatever nutrition may be, it isn’t a measurement of heat. Ergo, they are not the same.
It’s true that all foodstuff have calorific values (and perhaps it would have been more precise for me to have said that sugar has a high calorific value, rather than that it’s “packed with calories”). But then most things have calorific values, from teddy bears to tree trunks. Propane, for example, has a very high calorific value. That doesn’t make it nutritious.
I have also, as requested, re-read your post, and I concede that in my haste I criticised a point which you didn’t make. I would certainly agree that manufacturers frequently introduce preservatives, artificial or otherwise, into their foodstuffs, though I think the jury is still out as to whether the primary intent is to increase shelf life or to adulterate their products with cheaper ingredients. Sunny D would make an interesting case study.
I don’t understand your comparison of “processed foods” with “deli foods”, which as you quite rightly point out are often highly processed.
Let me be clear. I have no objection to people eating an unhealthy diet. But I do think that they should know that they are doing so.