National Government lifts ban on unhealthy foods in schools.

[magical1]

Well this one is beyond me!

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/healthy-living/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501238&objectid=10555439

http://www.stuff.co.nz/videoplayer/138949a24280.html

:bangshead:

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

They had no option. When you get pupils en masse from schools jumping over the school wall to go and get their fixes at dairies, what is the point? it was happening everywhere, and turning into a nightmare for teachers and schools. I'm wondering why that wasn't mentioned...

there's another problem around here too, and that is that lots of children aren't allowed to have things like peanut butter sandwiches at school in case a child suddenty becomes allergic to it. One mother I know, goes to school every day at lunchtime, and her child eats lunch outside the school grounds, in the car, because, as her mother says, why should she have her salads taken off her, because it's got nuts in it, or her yoghurt, because it's sweetened, or her peanut brownie, which she makes with wholemeal flour and molasses?

So there's two sides to this story.

[Spy]

A closet healthy eater? Hmmmm... :cool:

Yet it is the parents who should have their kids taken away from them if they go obese. :alien: Right.

Having said that, the so-called-ban-on-unhealthy-foods at our schools, while still standing, doesn't mean much, and not because kids run away to get fixes (they probly do), but because the schools' idea of healthy foods is somewhat... um... flawed. :giggle:

[magical1]

Well I have a differing view and as I have two school aged children I can tell you I swim against the tide as far as their eating goes and it does my head in!

The point is in time things will have changed. They gave up before the addictions to the crap had waved goodbye. Yes I see the private school girls who are all about 12 stone walking to the dairy (because their head mistress implemented healthy food) while I am on the way home from the gym and I look at them in horror. They are stocked up with chippies, red bulls, cokes. It is up to the parents yes, but many of them are absent too busy these days to be there after school for their kids let alone have the time to learn about nutrition and pass this gift onto their offspring.

Sausage sizzle as a "fundraiser" is criminal. Chocolate fundraisers are also bad and a cop out. The healthy food inititive also stopped these. No more though they are now free to go ahead again.

On Monday at my boys school they can have Hells Pizza delivered, Tuesday kebabs, Wednesday Subway, Thursday wholly bagels, Friday more pesticide filled rubbish.

I don't think they gave the inititive nearly enough time to see the upside for the kids... Lets face it This is the generation that won't out live their parents. Should we be pussy footing around the issue or should we be looking after them by taking a tough stand?

[Lexie]

Sounds like a messed up ordeal. Kids leaving school to satisfy their caffeine/sugar/grease addictions is sad... In the case of obese children, unless some type of illness/imbalance is causing it, they most likely weren't brought up on a healthy diet at home to begin with. Most people don't even know what really is considered healthy. And we have a lot more unhealthy, processed junk than we used to have when I was a kid. It kind of makes your head spin. If you haven't been doing your homework, so to speak, you may be too overwhelmed to try at this point.

I don't know what the economy is like there, but in America right now it's a strain if both parents aren't working. When you have to devote 40 hours a week to a job, that makes you less interested in spending your free time reading about such a heavy subject. Especially if you were never told just how important diet was in the grand scheme of things.

Threatening to take kids away from overworked, ignorant parents is not the way. The sheeple mentality makes one lazy--to add insult to injury. People don't necessarily want to be ignorant. They've just been trained into it. And when following the grain doesn't show very obvious ill effects, it remains unquestioned.

While kids do need to be educated on health and nutrition, parents need some education on this as well. The question is how to get it to them.

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

I don't think they gave the inititive nearly enough time to see the upside for the kids... Lets face it This is the generation that won't out live their parents. Should we be pussy footing around the issue or should we be looking after them by taking a tough stand?

So if I support this "initiative", and the government takes the same "initiative" stance on vaccination of all children, etc, etc for the same spurious reasons ... and when they come to take my kids off me because I've not vaccinated them, or given them flouride toothpaste, or a whole raft of other compulsory "initiatives", what will I then say?

When does an initiative, actually become a much deeper issue?

Is the issue here "food" or is the issue here... really something else?

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

It's very complicated as this item (http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article5575394.ece) shows: [quote]The Times

January 26, 2009


In losing weight, we've lost our way

The cult of thinness - and fear of its apparent opposite, obesity - has gone too far, says Susie Orbach in an extract from her new book, Bodies


The West has grown terrified of obesity. To read the figures put out by the International Obesity Task Force, one might believe we were in the midst of an obesity epidemic that will swamp our health service and ruin the lives of the next generation.

We are told that by 2050 half of the children in the UK will be obese. Without being glib and dismissing the justified concern about the growth in obesity, we need to contextualise this and see it as part of the high level of eating difficulties which beset people in the West. Many of the eating difficulties, which include compulsive eating and bulimia, are less visible than obesity but they are no less widespread; indeed, they are more prevalent.

Teenage girls in particular are so caught up in worries about their body size that very few of them eat in relation to appetite and stop when they are physically satisfied. Such concepts as appetite and satiety elude them. They are a generation who have grown up with mothers who worry about the acceptability of their bodies and who they have seen be inconsistent, wary and often anxious about their own eating, size and body shape.

These daughters have learnt from early on to be cautious around food, relying on rules and regulations, which they occasionally rebel against, rather than biological cues. What has become the eating norm for teenage girls is far from what would have been considered “normal” eating 20 years ago.

Playing about with appetite, or eating only on weekends, or just one meal a day, or some such scheme, can indeed lead to thinness, but because it cannot be sustained, it can equally well lead to fatness. Emotional and biological rebellions against a life of food restriction, deprivation and compulsive exercising can produce either anorectic-style responses or what appears to be its opposite - out-of-control eating.

From the therapist's point of view, these two forms of managing food share complementary characteristics. Anorectics have a tendency to overestimate their size. The obese tend to underestimate theirs. Neither see themselves as they are. Nor do either have an easy time accepting their appetites.

The people whose eating difficulty expresses itself in an anorectic manner are so afraid of appetite and desire that they create a situation in which they are indeed hungry, they experience it, but their hunger is there to reassure them that they can do without nourishment, that they do not require much. Their emotional and physical appetites feel unwieldy and wrong unless they are overridden. In controlling their hunger and what emanates from them, they are showing us a food-oriented version of a response to a false body.

People who eat in an out-of-control fashion also find hunger and need intolerable: they cannot bear to experience their need. Their response to the dilemma of appetite and desire is to eat in advance of feeling what for them is too painful a call of hunger. It is possible to understand this prophylactic eating as another version of the false-body phenomenon.

Whether striving for thinness, afraid of it or managing it, a fear of appetite and an unreliable body sense stalk many girls' and women's days. Thinness has become an aspirational issue, a means to enter what on the surface appears to be a new classless society. But it is - falsely, I believe - promoted as a health issue in which the psychological underpinnings of appetite and thinness are bypassed. Often behind the desire for thinness - which affects those who are fat, those who are thin and all sizes in between - there exists an unhappy, unhealthy relationship to food and to the body. When confusions are created around size, when size depends on the transformation of personal biology and not on knowing and responding to when one is hungry and when one is satisfied, there can be no peace.

The sense of having a stable body whose size and appetites one knows and can trust is elusive. The recent emphasis on the Body Mass Index (BMI) compounds the problem. Interestingly, few medical people who are actually working in the area of nutrition and obesity find it a useful measure. There are better predictors for heart disease and diabetes that depend on the girth around the midriff area rather than the BMI, which is itself a crude measure of the ratio between height and weight. It was devised by the Flemish scientist Adolphe Quetelet in the mid-19th century, when the infatuation with social Darwinism made statistical measures all the rage.

In 1995 the World Health Organisation, under pressure from the International Obesity Task Force, revised the BMI in such a way that 300,000 Americans who had previously thought they were “normal” weight woke up to find themselves reclassified. Brad Pitt and George Bush, for example, were now overweight (a UK example would be Linford Christie), and George Clooney and Russell Crowe were obese. I think we can see how preposterous these classifications are and thus question the estimates categorising 50 per cent of our children in danger of becoming obese.

We can also question who is helped by this reclassification and examine the deleterious effect it has on our relationship to our bodies, especially if we look back to the 1950s, when ads proclaiming “Skinny? You'll miss out on summer fun!” sold “super wate-on” tablets to help women “put on pounds and inches of healthy flesh” to encourage that era's aesthetic, which was certainly a 27-plus BMI.

In collapsing a multitude of eating problems into the newly minted disease of obesity, we see the legitimising of commercial enterprises that swell their profits by creating panic around size and shape. Despite the newspaper column inches and the television documentaries about the obesity epidemic, there are few sustainable facts here. The studies claiming that 365,000 people a year in the US will die from obesity, that one in three children are obese and that a BMI of under 25 is optimum have all been shown to be fanciful. In fact, on the National Institute of Health's reanalysis of its own figures, one in fifteen children are seriously overweight in the US and some 26,000 will die from obesity-related diseases. Contrast this with the US figures for smoking-related deaths per annum of 600,000.

Obesity is a problem. I don't want to underestimate it. But I want to be sure that we see the social, psychological, class, visual, nutritional and commercial issues behind the so-called crisis. People may be eating more than their bodies require, their bodies may not be processing their food well, they may be eating foods that are hard to metabolise. This is certainly one part of the body story. So, too, is the aspirational thin-body story emerging in the new economies of eastern Europe, Arabia and Asia.
Then, too, the fat body may be refusing our visual and aspirational culture, saying, “I don't want this. I can't manage this,” or telling a story of the unhappiness which is encased in the fat body. The fat body could be challenging our overpowering preoccupation with image. It might signal a dismissal of childhood eating regimens. Or it might be more a statement about consumerism and the impossibility of so-called “choice”.

If we recognise how ways of eating can indicate a crisis around the body, it is possible to see that fatness is as much - if not more than - an indictment of our culture as it is a site of individual “failure”. Given that obesity is now being linked to poverty and low income, we also need to take note of class issues and how aspiration plays out for many who experience economic exclusion.

And of course more complex thought is required to supplant the oversimplistic talk of calories in and calories out that dominates government thinking. We need to insist on the links between the rise of obesity and the intensification of visual images of thin people; the introduction of long shelf-life foods saturated with fats, soy and corn syrup; the extraordinary growth of the diet industry; and the segmentation practised by the food industry, which takes out fat from one food, such as milk, and sells it back to us in another.

These four events parallel the rise of obesity. You could produce a graph showing the rise in the sale of low-fat milk and another that showed rising obesity numbers and they would fit perfectly.

Similarly, a graph of the growth of the diet industry would fit with one showing the rising numbers of larger people. And it is also the case that the rise in obesity statistics coincides with our increasingly sedentary lives and the preponderance of images of the incredibly lean.

Health economists and city planners are hard at work discussing the impact of the car and the design of our towns, shopping centres, rural transport and lighting in order to encourage us to move our bodies and eat sensibly as a matter of course. That is very important. But this focus can miss out on the emotional, psychological and class meanings attached not only to food and eating but to size. In an image-based culture, the conscious and unconscious meanings of fat and thin are highly complex. While fatness might be regarded as laziness and indulgence, this is far from the experience of the eater with bulk.

The designation of fat as worthy of scorn and dislike, and of fat people as outsiders who should not only dislike themselves but also be discriminated against, is growing. This is not a new phenomenon (hence the organisations that exist to defend the rights of fat people) but the disrespect has intensified. Fat and fatness are now demonised and are seen as signals of class.

Yes, there are class issues involved in food distribution, food costs and nutritional education, but the contempt with which people talk about fat and fat people indicates something else. This is now viewed as a condition to be avoided, since it signifies both a loss of psychological control and membership of the wrong class, with an implied set of false aspirations.

There is some discussion now about whether the diseases that are becoming more prevalent, such as diabetes, actually cause obesity or are caused by it. Some are suggesting that the content of food (such as high concentrations of corn syrup) can produce diabetic responses.

There is also clear evidence that the most protective weight for health purposes is a BMI of 27.5 (if one accepts the BMI at all) - a figure that is presently in the recently designated overweight category. Interestingly, overweight people who exercise have a lower mortality rate than thin people who do not.

So one is led to wonder why thin has erroneously become the gold standard for health. Could it be that though the evidence does not support the idea of thinness as healthy and good, the overwhelming power of today's visual aesthetic has affected even doctors and medical researchers?

Extracted from Bodies by Susie Orbach, published today by Profile Books. Available from BooksFirst priced £9.89 (RRP £10.99), free p&p, on 0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst)

[Serephina]

Brilliant article! (we need an applause smilie) I would love the health authorities to focus on a "health at every size" approach rather than the current BMI farce.

I find it incredibly hypocritical that the government threatens to take overweight children away from their parents, yet doesn't seem to be the least concerned about the amount of trans fat, sugar laden junk in supermarkets allowed to be sold under the guise of "food", nor the erosion of open space in our urban areas that would enable people to get out be be active or create community garden to grow real food. The lower socio-economic areas suffer most and it is little surprise that people in these areas have worse health outcomes regardless of their own personal level of education or income.

[Lexie]

Did not know that about BMI. I always knew something was off about it. I remember watching brief portions of a show where these thin cheerleaders were being weighed in an odd machine and someone with 20% body fat was told she was way too heavy and needed to start doing some extra working out.

[Serephina]

This is a great little slideshow that shows what a silly measurement the BMI really is

http://kateharding.net/bmi-illustrated/

And 20% body fat is on the lower end of normal for an adult woman. Is it any wonder we have so many young girls suffering from eating disorders :bangshead:

[Lexie]

That's what I thought too! They were told they had to have 10% ideally. Ridiculous.