This is getting silly....

[Workingman]

.... food labelling, that is.

There is now a call from the Royal Society for Public Health for food labels to tell us how much exercise we need to do to burn off the calories we have just consumed.

We already have lists of ingredients and their percentages, but they are often scientific names and so are of very little help to most consumers unless they are prepared to spend ages looking every one of them up on their smartphones.

Then we have all the information on fats, sugars, salt, fibre, again with a percentage of their recommended daily amounts. They are not a great deal of use unless a person has a spreadsheet of every item they eat with a running total of all the different categories.

So now we are going to get exercise charts telling us how much walking we need to do to burn off that coffee, chocolate bar and egg mayo sandwich.

It will get to the point that there will be nowhere on the label to say what the product is.

[Kaz]

That is ridiculous!

[Aggers]

It doesn't make sense to me, either, Frank.

But this does-

Dr Asseem Malhotra, cardiologist adviser to the National Obesity Forum,
said he was all for encouraging activity but added: “What this sort of
labelling doesn’t do is account for the fact that different calories have
a different metabolic effect on the body,” he said. “What you don’t
want is to give people the impression you can out-exercise a bad diet.”

[Diflower]

Very silly!
It would cost them less to patrol the streets and talk to people...not that they'd listen
If people were told, individually, 'you will die within a year unless you stop eating so much', it might just have some results, they need to be scared out of it.
As it is, they're happy to go on stuffing themselves and popping all kinds of pills for related conditions.
I'm not talking about the moderately overweight; there are an awful lot who are so incredibly obese you only need to look at them to know they're going to be a big drain on the nhs, if not already.
That money could be so much better spent.

[Suff]

Never mind the fact that, on review, every diet and cardiology study from the 50's onwards, on review, has shown that there is only ONE cholesterol factor which consistently increases the chances of heart disease.

That being LOW HDL Cholesterol. Your LDL and Triglycerides can be through the floor, but if your HDL cholesterol is low, then you are in real trouble. If your HSL is high, then the others can be higher too, but within reason...

How do you increase your HDL? Well, you eat eggs and bacon and salmon and cook them in lard. Oh and you avoid margarine, all cereals, bread, pasta, rice and all that rabbit food that they told us to eat. Even Potatoes with caution.

So now we're going to have labelling which still doesn't incorporate the latest findings on the studies which made our diets so bad. So we're going to have even more "bad diets" which will cause even more cardio problems....

Great. Wonderful. Just what we need.

[Workingman]

Quote: Dr Asseem Malhotra. “What you don’t want is to give people the impression you can out-exercise a bad diet.”

No, but these idiots from the Royal Society are certain that they can inform us out of bad diets with their information overloads.

Suff, we have a TV programme "Trust me, I'm a doctor". Last night they put one group of people on a saccharin sweetener diet and another on stevia. Saccharin has zero calories, so this new information would make it good: Right? Well no, because after only one week on 'diet' drinks and foods the blood sugar levels of the saccharin group were rising to danger levels for type 2 diabetes.

It is the same with low-fat foods. We are told they are good, but a lot of the fat is replaced with fillers, including sugars. Then there is the problem of relying on these foods to the point where our fat intake is too low - cells need fats to survive and they include a mix of unsaturated and saturated fats in a ratio of about 2.5:1.

[Suff]

I don't have enough hair left to read this....

[Kaz]

Far better to eat smaller amounts of real food, than the manufactured ingredients, I've gone back to full-fat cheese and butter but just use much less I do use a flora type margarine sometimes, but only for baking, and we use olive oil a lot for cooking. I've lost over 2st in just over a year, and Mick has lost a good stone by drinking a lot less and because I am cooking more healthily...We both look and feel much better for it, but people in general want the easy option, preferably a magic bullet.

[victor]

how did us silver surfers survive our childhoods with none of these "experts" to advise us and no dates on food labels???

[Kaz]

Rather more healthily than the current generation, it seems.........