Thursday, June 18, 2009

[poor diet] the lifestyle of choice in britain


You may have gathered I'm not all that well. I put it down to poor diet of late and am currently working to rectify it. It was interesting then to read Minette Marrin's remarks about the NHS and on health. Firstly, a little dig:

The NHS is the fourth-largest organisation in the world, after the Russian army, Indian railways and Wal-Mart. The idea that anyone at the top can begin in two years to understand what should and shouldn’t be done, let alone do something, is madness. For secretaries of state to skip at speed from post to post, using each ministry as a stepping stone in their career or as a way to prop up a self-serving prime minister, is not government; it is musical chairs.

Lovely. Now to the meat of it:

To me the phrase “public health” had come to mean “public nuisance”. However, my mind was changed by Christine Hancock, a former senior nurse and NHS manager and now European director of the Oxford Health Alliance, an international public health charity. She began by saying – and who can disagree – that she was exhausted by NHS reform. The service is obsessed by structures and finance, to the detriment of primary care.

Yet the main burden upon the NHS comes from chronic diseases – cardiovascular disease, lung disease, diabetes and cancers – which, apart from causing drawn-out suffering and death, are hugely expensive to treat. All these conditions are often caused or made worse by smoking, inactivity and a bad diet. Everyone knows that, but few people seem to care.


The acute hospital ward where I spent three weeks as a visitor recently was full of people almost too big for their beds, and certainly too heavy to lift, regularly visited by their outsize relations: people of normal weight were in a minority, except among the nurses and doctors.

Our streets and shops are full of people who are not just fat but obese, waddling from groaning sweetie counter to busy burger bar, eating food that is in effect poison.
Sugar is full of calories that make you fat and sick and it’s addictive. And it can give children serious mood swings. Most fizzy drinks are bottled disease. There are about 550 calories in a Big Mac, which by itself is well over a quarter of a woman’s or a child’s daily energy needs.

Yummy thingies and treatlets and biccies are swimming in invisible fat to fuzz up your arteries. To give such things to children is nothing short of child abuse.
As for good food, according to Hancock, only 25% of the population eat five portions of fruit or vegetables a day, and 50% of children – an astonishing figure – eat no fruit or veg at all in the week. I am sick of people talking about health education and “lifestyle choices”.

What’s clearly needed, contrary to everything I’ve always thought, is a little compulsion. Our NHS and our economy cannot take the consequences of poor lifestyle choices.


First, all schools should make healthy meals compulsory and should offer pupils one meal only – no choice – and make them eat it. (Allowances would be made for religious taboos and ill health.)

Second, the polluter must pay, as the Greens always say. The polluters who manufacture junk food of all kinds should be forced to label it, like cigarette packets, with simple information about calories.

And the food itself, the pollutant, should be made extremely expensive, by high taxes, so that those who are polluting their own bodies would have a powerful incentive to stop.
Admittedly this is hard on the poorest, who eat the most junk food, but bad diets are not only bad for them.

This last sentence I'd like to look into further.

Where I live now, it's a certain distance from an ASDA but there is a corner shop round the ... er ... corner. This corner shop therefore supplies what sells. In that shop are packaged sandwiches, bottled orange juice and some fruit near the door but the rest of the shop is groaning under the weight of junk food.

That's the problem with Ms Marrin's idea. No one wants good food. It's not yummy in most people's eyes and they've often grown up knowing no other choices.

If I'm out of food and I want to have a healthy meal, I can't. There is none in that shop.

Now, contrast that with Russia where every second housing block has a shop of some kind on the ground floor. In that is bought kasha [buckwheat, couscous etc.], rice and many cereals and all have bain-maries with a variety of meats, fresh and cured.

Admittedly, greens can't be bought from there, except in the form of salads, of which varieties on cabbage are the majority. Salads are big sellers in Russia. For fresh greens, you have to go to the markets. On the way back home, one must run the gamut of the babushki selling their cottage cheese from deep pans into your bottles you've brought, radishes, garlic, shoe-cleaning materials, fuses, spanners, jams, lettuces, tomatoes and cigarettes [that latter not so good].

So, put me in the same position - having no food in the flat and wanting to buy some, I'd return from my local shop with half a fish or chicken breast, some salads and some kasha, pick up a couple of items form the babushki and there we were. The cumulative result of a few years of living like that, combined with walking most places, was that I was healthy and looking younger than my years.

Over here, a year of junk food [given that that is all that is available from the corner shop and I have no fridge] has resulted in the inevitable. With no fridge, fresh meat is a day to day affair but that takes some organizing because a shop which sells it is so far away. There is the corner shop, as I said and a chippie up the road which is one of the greasier ones. In the main street there are burger places and Indian but nothing fresh.

There needs to be something like the Russian stolovaya. The west makes fun of these but when you walked in, one bought, for remarkably little money, salad, soup, piece of meat and two veg and finished it up with tea. These places were everywhere, as tea-rooms are over here. Basically, not only was that lunch taken care of but one didn't need anything else for a few hours.

If I don't do something quickly to circumvent this, I'm sure I'm heading for heart disease. It might even be too late. It will be hard to do - there are no longer cabbages to be had [for the last two weeks] and the buckwheat disappeared off the shelves some months ago. Finding good food within half a mile in Britain is very difficult.

But I'll try.

Just a note about Russia.

There was a push, in my last years there, to run the babushki off the streets and force everyone to go to the new hypermarts, government built, where stalls were rented at high premiums and the only kiosks left were ice-cream, confectionery and cigarette bars. So the process of westernization had already begun, children were starting to become obese [never before 2002] and that's the point I departed Russia.

6 comments:

  1. My God, you'd have to be very fat to be fatter than some of the nurses I see.

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  2. They wouldn't qualify for the cover of Vogue, Dearieme?

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  3. Didn't realise you weren't well, Jamesie. Sorry about that. What's happened to the NHS is the same as happened to education - Thatcher's lot thought they coulkd be run like businesses and they can't because the "product" is people. I know you won't agree but I was there and that's what happened.

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  4. I can give you some good healthy store cupboard ideas (in case of emergencies) if you would like xx

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  5. sorry that I missed you were in poor health...and me in the health care biz...hope you're feeling better.

    was reading another post but can't quite find...what's this about you having a stalker? or maybe I misread.

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