Parents should remove sugary drinks completely from children’s diets, public health officials have advised after halving the Government’s recommended limit on sugar intake.
Since 1991 guidelines have suggested that no more than 10 per cent of people’s daily energy should come from the sugars either added or naturally present in food and drink.
In a major study published on Friday, scientific advisers to the Department of Health called for the limit to be reduced to 5 per cent.
Jane Ellison, the public health minister, said the recommendation had been accepted immediately and would be used to develop a “new strategy on cutting childhood obesity”, with changes to the law expected in the autumn.
It’s not so much the idiocies of the public health wallahs: that’s just the latest refuge of he Puritan class. It’s that we have a nominally Conservative government at present. Whose public health minister one would hope would be a particularly crusty peer, one whose reaction to this sort of nanny statism would be to set the hounds on those with the impertinence to suggest that this was a proper exercise of the government’s powers.
So how do we get a conservative government one of these fine days?
These days people go into politics so that they can boss other people around. Did you really expect Husky dog sledge Dave to be any different?
Conservative? We desperately need to resurrect the old-fashioned Liberals. Ass for how, my best guess is that we all meet up at a pub somewhere and get started.
Sadly, a lot of the ordinary electorate love this stuff. Try arguing the principles behind the objection to the smoking ban with somebody and you’ll get “Well, I like it that my clothes don’t smell any more when I go to the pub.”
Er, what? Am I missing something here? Cause I thought that was where we got more like 100% of our energy. Or can humans now be retrofitted with solar panels?
S2, clearly whoever suggested the 10% figure wasn’t listening in class when carbohydrates were explained. Fucking morons, every last one of them.
The top priority of any government genuinely opposed to socialism would be to remove the left’s hand from education’s throat and methodically smash the fingers one by one with a lump hammer. As long as the left control education they can make as many new lefties as they need.
So, Dave, thoughts?
RlJ>
“So, Dave, thoughts?”
I think you’d be a let happier at the Graun, with views like that.
S2: you get energy from fat, and protein, too, if necessary.
BICR,
Yes, but 90% of it?
Maybe Lucozade could start making a sugar-free sports drink out of bacon.
Tim Newman, they’d be the people that are ‘going to the pub’ in such numbers, pubs are closing everywhere?
Well, that’s the thing with the UK innit? Your conservative party isn’t really conservative, your labour party doesn’t really give a fuck about the workers, and your liberal party sure as hell ain’t really liberal. At least the Scottish National Socialist Party is all three of the things it claims.
S2>
How about alcohol?
“Yes, but 90% of it?”
Some days…
We’re bags of salty water held together by protein, fat and gristle and powered by sugar.
So at least they haven’t tried to restrict our water intake in the name of public health… Yet.
All of the British parties, including UKIP, are some variety of socialist/social democrat. There is no genuinely liberal party. I guess this is the way British people like it.
A quick look at the Political compass graphic below shows where UK parties sit on the spectrum between Left, Right, Authoritatrian and Libertarian
UK Political Parties 2015
Notice how none of them are in the Right/Liberal “Freidmanite” quadrant. Not a single one. Indeed, the only one that used to be (Liberal/Lib Dem) has shifted markedly towards the Authoritarian.
Historical Positions Of UK Parties
Of course, no party or government ever wants to vote itself less powers…
To answer your question; when we are like Greece is going to be in 5 years’ time.
When we have borrowed so much money we can borrow no more and everyone realises we need to dig ourselves out of a hole.
Mind you, such as Cameron would have sold us off to be an EU state long before then.
That political compass is good. I’m Economic Left/Right: 4.5, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -0.41
Wonder where Murphy would be? Probably somewhere around -10, +10 😀
2.3, -4.2.
Not sure about the historical positions. I think you’d have a hard time convincing most Victorian-era liberals to support gay rights. Issues change over time. Sticking Hitler slightly on the economic right is also a bit weird – many of the right/left things are more about corporate capitalism, whereas to me the “liberal economic right” thing is as much about opposition to corporate welfare and monopolism, but that doubtless sticks me further left on the political compass than I think I should be. An environmental regulation, for example, isn’t aimed specifically at megacorps but says no one can spew noxious gases over Indian villages.
Sorry, Rhyds, but that political map is cobblers. I mean, how does it get the Greens on the libertarian side of the divide?
“how do we get a conservative government one of these fine days?”: persuade the electorate.
Most complaints about politicians are just a rather stupid way of complaining about the electors, just as most complaints about the supermarkets are really complaints about their customers.
Why do the supermarkets stock rubbishy food? Because much of the British public likes rubbishy food. Simples.
“We’re bags of salty water held together by protein, fat and gristle and powered by sugar.”
Don’t forget starches. The reason pastas etc are so lardy is they are concentrated starches, and the body converts the excess into fat reserves.
Also look at the weight loss effects of the Atkins diet which strives to removes all carbs from your diet, not just sugar.
“Why do the supermarkets stock rubbishy food?”
Because supermarkets are about feeding the 50 million, not catering to the exquisite tastes of the epicures.
When I do that political compass thing my dot sits on top of Milton Friedman’s, which is fine by me.
BiG>
“I think you’d have a hard time convincing most Victorian-era liberals to support gay rights.”
I don’t know about ‘most’, but you wouldn’t have had any trouble convincing prominent Victorian (and earlier) liberals of that: they were at least intellectually consistent.
They talk about “Free Sugars” as a way to make the sugars added to foods sound scary. When they are only used to make food palatable as fat & salt are not allowed any more. A bit like the term “Empty Calories” tries to make out that calories from soft drinks do nothing.
It will only end in unintended consequences. No sugars but carbs not banned, so people will eat more carbs not realising that they are sugars too. So more pasta & pizza & cereal will be eaten and there will be an obesity epidemic and the experts will blame it on something else. Just like the experts keep changing their minds about climate change, first it was an ice age, now its a warm age.
SadBut – we are heading for new ice age again now.
Wish these priests of the new religion would make up their minds.
“Dongguan John
July 18, 2015 at 12:15 pm
That political compass is good. I’m Economic Left/Right: 4.5, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -0.41
Wonder where Murphy would be? Probably somewhere around -10, +10 ”
Murphy wouldn’t get the significance and would wear it as a badge of honour.
If I was as rich as the average Grauniad hack I could get all my calories from steak, carrots and mushrooms.
What? the proletariat can’t afford to eat steak at every meal?!? Scandal! Blame the wicked Tories!
@ SadButMadLad
You understate their evil
Free sugar includes that in cakes which is not “added”: it is intrinsic to the recipe. I didn’t eat a single crumb of the last cake I baked – it was all eaten by guys and gals who had just run a 10k race. Any doctor with more than two brain cells would approve.
I just tried the compass, too. I now see how, if that was the methodology used, the Greens are somehow libertarian: I found the questions very presumptive, and almost halfthe time was giving answers that bore little relation to my actual views.
I also came in on top of Friedman. Could be worse, but certainly not accurate.
And I find myself accountable annoyed.
Accountably
If their EU masters won’t let them minimum price alki–will these arrogant Blulab twats be allowed to start fiddling with sugar prices?
Sometimes the “useful idiot” concept works for the good guys too.
‘…no more than 10 per cent of people’s daily energy should come from the sugars either added or naturally present in food and drink.’
So does that mean the advice to eat 5 a day will be scrapped since fruit and veg are full of sugars?
And since sugar is a carbohydrate, and apart from fats and meat, most other foods contain carbohydrates, exactly what is everyone supposed to eat?
Ed,
> I found the questions very presumptive, and almost halfthe time was giving answers that bore little relation to my actual views.
The questions are awful. I was giving answers that do reflect my actual views, but knowing full well that I wasn’t interpreting the questions the way they were intended. They are making the classic mistake (that I used to warn my IT support trainees against) of trying to write nice English when trying to get precise answers. A test like this should have language that seems a bit blunt and clunky because it has no ambiguity. One of the worst examples, I thought, was
The proposition they almost certainly really want to test is “Some criminals cannot be rehabilitated” or perhaps “Some criminals cannot practically be rehabilitated”, but they’ve added this “waste of time” bollocks, which actually drastically changes the meaning. Some criminals cannot be rehabilitated, but trying to do so is still useful and valuable. For a start, without trying and failing, how would we know that it can’t be done in some cases, and how would we know which cases?
Badly worded questions piss me right off.
Still got 4.5, -3.79. Which I don’t think is correct, but at least it’s not crazy.
@Ecks,
So tell me – is it libertarian to be able to have a government fixing prices or libertarian to have a government that’s not allowed to fix prices?
Focusing on just that one narrow issue, and ignoring the rest of the bile stored up for the EU – answer me honestly.
Y’see – it’s one of those how to confuse a “libertarian because I want to pay less tax, not particularly because I believe in freedom-type libertarian” questions. Whether limits on the illiberal laws governments can pass are a good thing.
O to ask a similar question on a different scale with no bile involved – is it a good thing Brighton & Hove isn’t allowed to ban cars from its roads? Or shouldn’t the good free people of Brighton be allowed to do so if they so wish? Which is the liberal solution? Whose rights trump whose?