www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-21228122 Is it a good idea? Would it work? Is it "nanny state gone mad"? I must confess to suppressed despair recently, seeing many hugely obese people twenty years my junior struggling to waddle around the hospital. I told myself that I didn't know the background to their cases and shouldn't judge without that knowledge but I still couldn't shake off the thought of how many there were.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-21228122 Is it a good idea? Would it work? Is it "nanny state gone mad"? I must confess to suppressed despair recently, seeing many hugely obese people twenty years my junior struggling to waddle around the hospital. I told myself that I didn't know the background to their cases and shouldn't judge without that knowledge but I still couldn't shake off the thought of how many there were.

On the one hand, I'm not enamoured of the state attempting to micro-manage every aspect of daily life.



On the other, the rise of the fatty can't be denied and I'm inclined to believe the apocalyptic predictions of the strain it will put on the NHS if it continues unchecked. Given that, perhaps it's time for those people who seem unable to help themselves to be taken in hand?



I was struck by the hatchet job that Jane Moore did on Weight Watchers on TV last night - the basis of her objection to the company appeared to be that people lose weight whilst on the diet, then put it back on when they stop; I'm not comfortable with the abrogation of personal responsibility that view represents and we do seem to be drifting towards a situation where being fat is attributable to pretty much anything other than laziness, lack of self-respect or greed, which I'm sure is the case in many instances.



It's a quandary.

Why is placing a tax on sugar any more 'micro management' than taxing income.



Discouraging people from eating sugar and rotting their teeth is probably better than discouraging them from work.

[url=http://thevoluptuousmanifesto.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/marketing-at-its-brightest-breakfast.htmlI did a short piece last night on marketing and, in effect, why people can try to eat well, but still get hoodwinked by massive companies' marketing[/url.



Low-fat yogurts is another one: people see'low fat' and think those are healthy, but many such things are crammed full of sugar.



The recent discussion by the Fabians/Labour over placing a cap on the amount of sugar that could be included in breakfast cereals: I mean, I know that the majority of cereals, no matter how much they are portrayed as healthy, contain sugar (and salt). But it was still a shock to discover that some cereals – particularly those marketed specifically at children – contain [imore than[/i 30% sugar.



Loathe though I am to invoke any idea of 'morality', there is not a single, solitary shred of moral justification for that. And for all that we talk about personal responsibility, why not corporate responsibility too? If responsibility is good, then it should be good per se, large companies shouldn't be exempted from it.



And it is worth repeating that the sort of companies we're talking about employ people with Phds etc to do their marketing; to work out how to sell to people without Phds.



Someone with serious qualifications in psychology planning the layout of a supermarket in order to maximise the spend of anyone who walks through the doors. What about the responsibility there?

Ooh no, it's immoral not to provide "choice" and it's the consumer's fault if they choose to buy those products.

As I discovered last night, analysing the ingredients and marketing of a new product, you can dedicatedly read the list of ingredients – and still not immediately realise the complete picture.



In that case, it was a 'breakfast biscuit' that is very much marketed as healthy – everything shrieks that, from the packaging to the ingredients. Oh yes, one type of wheat, followed by five more grains – all listed individually – so that by the time you get to 'sugar', you think it's far lower down the ingredients list than actually third spot. And then, in sixth, there's dextrose as well. And that's without mentioning three different raising agents.



I'm sure it's all quite deliberate.

It's like breaking a code.



"No artificial sweeteners" usually means it's full of sugar.

"No added sugar" usually means it's artificially sweetened.



Talk about "accentuate the positive" ... it's all smoke and mirrors.

Absolutely.



As I mentioned, 'low fat' often also means, 'full of sugar to compensate for the loss of flavour caused by the loss of fat, but we all know that natural fats are the worst thing on planet Earth'.

Yesterday, I saw a Warburton's Wholemeal loaf (I am deliberately avoiding calling it bread) labelled "Low Fat".



What wholemeal bread would be other than Low Fat?

It's that deskilling, isn't it? People look at 'low fat' and have been trained to think that that's the apotheosis of healthy eating. That they don't realise that most proper, traditional UK breads would hardly ever have much (if any) fat in them It's indicative of what Raymond Blanc says about how we (and the US) have become divorced from our culinary heritage.

I saw a TV program some months ago about marketing cereals to people and in particular into the UK. There simply wasn't such a market for sweet cereals untiil just after WWII.



What the program pointed out was that the companies started adding sugar and removing fibre. That is the cereals were [iprocessed [/ias opposed top pre-war cereals which were mostly not. The addition of sugar was a deliberate attempt to appeal to children and Sugar Smacks introduced in the 1950's were actually 56% sugar.



It also mentioned that for a company, selling processed cereals is a real money spinning exercise because they basically turn what is virtually a useless commodity (the type of grain used) into a highly profitable end product.



There is a very good an d in depth article here that describes the history very well:



[urlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/nov/23/food-book-extract-felicity-lawrence[/url



As it points out it is just amazing we eat the stuff given the manufacturing process takes all the goodness out (in order to make the product stable with good shelf life) and then they put "goodness" back in chemically.



Made me laugh when the man from Kellogs said if they took too much salt and sugar out of cornflakes the packet would taste better.







This is also true and is along the same lines as marketing such as "Have a break, have a Kit, Kat" or "Milky Way, the bar you can eat between meals". As a country we never used to eat between meals and so marketing was set the task of creating such a market. Cereals have gone down a similar path and the addition of sugar and how that came about as described in the article above is a fascinating insight into marketing.







I also saw another program very recently that was debating the obese issue and the right wing libertarian nut case on the show was saying "If poor people want to get fact that is their right". He had put forward the notion that the richer you are the thinner you are. That is not strictly true as obesity is at a level it can't just be confined to the less well off but that was his argument.



Anyway the point he was missing was that marketing [idoes work[/i. It isn't the simple choice thing as he wanted us to believe. If it was there would be no point paying anyone to market anything in the way they do. The opposing view was we need to stop people getting obese via legislation as it's going to cost us a fortune on the NHS. This cut no ice with our libertarian but then he probably thinks we should all pay for our own health care directly so if we "choose" to get fat we can pay for the treatment if there are consequences.



I am not sure a sugar tax is the right way to legislate because we simply need less sugar (and salt and other rubbish) in food. The traffic light system that got kicked out would IMO change the nations diet in a very short time but as you can see if you read the article I linked above cereal companies deliberately adopt a more confusing and misleading approach. Corporate responsibility? Yeah right. Cereal companies are the last place to look for that.

I'm not suggesting for a minute that the corporations producing and marketing this muck don't have some responsibility, but is there genuinely anyone left in the UK who doesn't know in general terms what foods are 'good' and what are 'bad?' The 'low fat' yoghurt scam for example, is hardly breaking news, nor is the sugary breakfast cereal. Equally, the message about taking a reasonable amount of exercise couldn't have been made clearer; you can't turn the telly on these days without seeing a programme about fat people, detailing either their faddy diets, their embarassing bodies or their attempts to lose weight - they've even been turned into reality TV shows, to target the lowest common denominator.



For all the power of advertising that apparently forces people to buy high fat, high sugar products, there is a similar weight of information out there to advocate eating those things in moderation and taking exercise; I'm not convinced that people have become so deskilled in the areas of health and nutrition that the power of advertising has mesmerised them into stuffing their faces so full of junk that they have become clinically obese and are unsure how it happened or what to do about it.