Th UK is on a bit of a health kick at the moment with lots of kneejerk programs warning about bad and unsuitable diets. Last night we were treated to a Jamie Oliver special showing the internal organs of a 25stone man who died of heart failure - seeing the fat INSIDE his body was unbelievable - his heart was twice the usual size and riddled with the stuff and fat had pushed his lungs up so they were a fraction of their normal size. Must have been awful for him
I'm posting again because of a program tonight which focuses on
eating out in Britain.
http://www.channel4.com/news/article...r+food/1293447
Here's a summary
"Britain is the most obese nation in Europe, and we're continuing to pile on the pounds. Many of us believe it's not our fault, choosing to blame our genes, age or metabolism. Others find their weight gain a complete mystery.
This investigation examines the excuses we make for our increased girth and debunks the myths that mask our calorie consumption. Journalist Jane Moore examines how much food we're really eating and
puts the spotlight on the food industry to reveal what effect our increased dining-out habit is having on our health.
Moore takes a group of children undercover to find out just how much fat is on the menu for kids in Britain's favourite family restaurants. She meets a family who insist that despite eating healthily and exercising they seem unable to shift their excess weight.
With the help of a fridge-cam and a little secret surveillance, Dispatches attempts to unearth the root cause of their problem. "
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I saw the same program last week which showed that many of the ready meals people buy at supermarkets which are labelled as being 'low fat' or 'healthy options' were terribly misleading:
"Dispatches investigates the claims made by a range of popular products, subjecting many of them to laboratory analysis. The results are unappetising - labelling can be grossly inaccurate, 'healthy' options can have more calories than ordinary ranges and supermarkets are stocking some products that make unsubstantiated health claims.
Dispatches examines the accuracy of nutritional information on the packaging of many convenience foods and finds a dramatic difference between what some labels state and the reality - revealing a huge margin for error in some measurements such as the percentage of fat - and the flawed legislation that allows misleading information to be featured on packaging."
This is really the root of why I believe it really is down to Education and awareness. The only person I trust to decide if a product is a healthy one or not is myself. If store bought meals (which are regulated and subjected to a degree of scrutiny) can't be relied on to offer the health benefits they claim, there's no guarantee a restaurant will be modifying its own meals to a level that I would consider satisfactory before presenting it as a 'healthy' option. If you put 9 spoons of salt in a tomato sauce and add 9 spoons of sugar you won't even realise you're eating that much salt, which helps explain why Pizza Hut can add 2/3 of an ounce of salt (and who knows what else) to one of their pizzas