Healthier food could be achieved

[The idea of placing taxes on high calorie foods in a bid to encourage healthy eating has been tabled at an international convention.

According to one expert, providing farmers with incentives to produce more healthy foods could also be an attractive option and would lead to clear health benefits for consumers.

The number of overweight people in the world has now exceeded the number who are undernourished, said the University of North Carolina's Professor Barry Popkin.

Speaking at the 26th conference of the International Association of Agricultural Economists in Australia, the professor said that eating habits and decreasing activity levels are largely to blame.

"Obesity is the norm globally and under-nutrition, while still important in a few countries and in targeted populations in many others, is no longer the dominant disease," he said.

"The reality is that globally, far more obesity than under-nutrition exists and the rates of change for the former are large and positive while those of the latter are small and negative."

The professor said that governments needed to develop strategies, such as placing taxes on high calorie foods and providing subsidies for healthier options, thus encouraging people to eat more healthily.

"A central issue affecting the world's public health is the need to shift the relative prices of a range of foods to encourage healthier, less energy dense and more nutrient dense foods," he added.]

http://www.fdin.co.uk/news/index.php

I have thought this might one day come to fruition.

I know some will say it is the nanny state.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4784873.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5263156.stm

"There are now more overweight people across the world than hungry ones, according to international health experts.

They are warning that both rich and poor countries have failed to address the obesity epidemic" BBC News

[oldspice]

I think they should ration food that is low in nutritional value and encourage people to grow their own organic fruit and veg like they did in the war.

Many of my family (cousins and younger aunts) were raised on home-grown produce and on eggs that came from their own hens and rabbits from their own pens.

Seventy years ago George Orwell (real name - Eric Arthur Blair) was lamenting the fact that mass produced food of little nutritional value was cheaper and more plentiful than fruit and good, lean meat. He argued that the Government liked it this way because it kept the people passive and content. As long as they had cinema, chocolate and cheap fish and chips, they thought they were happy. It saved them from revolution.

[loulou]

I think all these takeaways selling rubbish burgers should be banned. They encourage people to eat junk .I go to a local farm to buy my fruit and veg. My parents grew their own veg for years and we had much nicer meals back then.

[oldspice]

Also, these take-aways do nothing to discourage their customers from throwing the cartons and wrappers all over the place. Big chains are quite good at getting staff to go out and pick up litter generated by their customers (and other litter too) but most of the tacky independent take-aways round here are surrounded by their own litter and do nothing to clear it up. They don't even sponsor a litter bin. oldspice38949.4716666667

Why are so many peole very overweight and obese?  I'm not sure it's so much what they eat but that they take less excercise than 20 or 30 years ago.  The remote control has a lot to answer for.  If you have to get up to change the TV channel 10 times per night that's 3,650 times you get up and get down in a year.  That probably burns off 10 calories per time, which is 36,500 calories.  That's equivalent to between 150 and 200 bars of chocolate.  More people drive than 30 years ago, which means that they're not walking to and from bus stops.  If everybody could be encouraged to walk one mile per day quite briskly it would have a big impact on obesity.  Exercise is the key.

[oldspice]

I agree in some ways. However, more people go to the gym now than in past years. i don't drive so i do a lot of walking - I walk to and from work each day and also often woalk to town (three miles).

The majority of the workforce work harder now than in past years - especially white-collar workers. However, there has been a reduction in manual work which burned up more calories (dock work, heavy engineering, coal mining ect).

I definitely think people spend more on luxury, high calorie foods which are cheaper, realively speaking, than they were years ago. At home, we only ate biscuits and cakes at weekends (mainly home-cooked) and sweets or crisps were a friday night treat. Fizzy drinks were consumed only at Christmas and on summer holidays. Most people keep all these things in their cupboards routinely and would consider them necessities.

Nail on the head methinks, Oldspice.

"more people go to the gym now than in past years."

but not obese people.

bounty hunter38949.4936921296

[loulou]

I do not walk half as much as I used to now that I work from home. That is true about the cakes and biscuits too. My mam only gave them to us on Sundays. Now every day of the week I have  a biscuit of some sort.

[Forth Bridges]

FAT TAX: that what it is....



a great IDEA, but sweets are the problem we had sweet 60 years ago, and there
was less fat people then!



it al theses CHEAP, nasty extra ingredients there add, and all those saits as
well



back in the 50's - 70's most (house wife’s) made form from srake but now
nowadays it all pre-made and full of CRAP! That unhealthy stuff for you bodies

Also back in the 70’s in the US, there invented
all you can eat places, there did this through a number of technecysy that made
it possible made More cheaper/ crappie food at a low cost

[smurfboy]

I think all these takeaways selling rubbish burgers should be banned. They encourage people to eat junk .

No one forces anybody to eat there.

True. Some people however do need to be protected from themselves?

[kevvosa]

No one forces anybody to eat there.

Yes but it's not that simplistic, willpower doesnt come easy for people who enjoy those foods.

[smurfboy]

I'm just sick of seeing TV shows showing parents with obese kids who blame a) supermarkets, b) fast food chains, c) the government, d) schools and e) everyone but themselves. It's never their own fault for shovelling too much food in their gobs is it?

[kevvosa]

I think it's a combo of a) how people are brought up and b)agressive marketing by junk food companies.