I read this on David Farrar’s blog so  have block quoted here. Original piece from Danyl’s Dim-post blog on the current political debate about government funding of nutrition initiatives {… maybe I should have a conversation with myself about the current folate debate … hmmm…}.  Anyway there’s some good satirical writing here if you are into that …

Conversation with myself about obesity

Left Wing Danyl: Corporations that sell high-fat and high sugar products are getting rich by selling people slow acting poisons. And they’re deliberately marketing these toxic food substitutes at children! Shouldn’t we at least pass laws to protect minors from these products? After all, we don’t let them buy cigerettes or alcohol.

Libertarian Danyl: Well that’s your answer to everything isn’t it? Just pass another law, take away a little bit more of our freedom, expand the power of the state. Charge people more taxes so you can furthur limit their choices. People should be free to eat whatever kind of food they want. We have enough problems with the nanny state in this country without politicians telling us what we can and can’t eat for dinner.

Economist Danyl: Hang on a minute there – I agree that people should be allowed to choose what foods to eat – but you have to admit that products like soft drinks and potato chips have massive negative externalities. They contribute to chronic illness like diabetes and heart disease and those have a cost to the public health system that other people end up paying for through their taxes.

Libertarian Danyl: Tax is theft!

Left Wing Danyl: Tax is the price you pay for living in a civilised society.

Libertarian Danyl: Civilised? Ha! To quote Ron Paul . . .

Moderate Danyl: Oh shut up, idiot. So Economist Danyl, are you saying there should be an excise on junk food?

Economist Danyl: Why not? That’s what we do with other products that have negative externalities, like tobacco and alcohol.

Left Wing Danyl: The problem there is that obesity is closely correlated with poverty. A tax on junk food would be a highly regressive tax.

Economist Danyl: Then poor people will act like rational maximisers and respond to the changing conditions of the market by switching to cheaper, healthier options.

Sarcastic Danyl: Right, the way they have with tobacco?

Realist Danyl: There are also huge political barriers to an excise – the food companies aren’t just going to lie back and let you devalue their product. They’ll claim that the science around obesity and nutrition is ‘deeply disputed’, that there is real controversy over whether or not french fries are bad for you . . .

Moderate Danyl: Okay, so regulation of food might be too complicated . . .

Libertarian Danyl: Hallelujah.

Moderate Danyl: How about encouraging exercise?

Libertarian Danyl: How about laws governing bed time?

Selfish Danyl: No wait, I think that’s a good idea. The government could subsidise my gym membership!

Realist Danyl: Sponsored exercise programs have repeatedly failed every time they’ve been trialed. The only people who benefit are those already using a gym, who tend to be disproportionately wealthy. Besides which, obesity is about diet not exercise – the best the gym will do is prevent you from gaining more weight.

Selfish Danyl: I don’t think that’s true – the science around obesity and weight loss is deeply disputed . . .

Moderate Danyl: What about before our wedding? We lost twenty kgs in a couple of months.

Realist Danyl: We were running for two hours almost every morning – that’s not very practical for most people. And we put most of the weight back on when we stopped. You have to change your diet, tubby.

Left Wing Danyl: So what? There’s no solution? It’s hopeless?

Moderate Danyl: Thatcher once said that the problem with being middle class is that you understand everyone’s point of view but have none of your own.

Left Wing Danyl: You’re quoting Thatcher now? What kind of bourgeoisie sell out are you? You’ve changed, man. You used to be so cool.

Realist Danyl: No you didn’t.

Go here to read full post and comments {both are a good read if you have a sense of humour!}

Here are some excerpt choice comments …

Comment by Carlos: Remember when eggs were considered the one way ticket to a heart attack? Ooops no, not as bad as 1st thought.  Remember when the answer was low fat diets, so out with olive oil and in with Nutragrain? Turns out that was a bad idea. Remember when red meat and dairy were declared evil? Only later did we ponder the serious consequences of iron and calcium deficiency. Nutritionists have a poor track record only economists can compete with. And we want to let them loose on our tax system?

{Cindy says: I could defend my profession and blame the media for sensationalising our messages. But it’s true; sometimes we get it wrong – especially when we follow the latest ‘studies’ and forget to use our common sense!}

Comment by Gareth: I am fundamentally against subsidising the public mental health services that clearly you will be availing yourself of…

Comment by Matt: I wish more people would force themselves to represent both sides of an argument. Aligning yourself with the “left” or “right” is counter-productive, like Bob Dylan once said “I don’t know left and right, I just know up and down”.

Remember Boyd Swinburn? He used to be the head of the New Zealand Heart Foundation – and a great advocate for healthy eating. Well my post on whether food or exercise has the most effect on weight was sparked by this recent study he conducted …

Increased food intake alone explains the increase in body weight in the United States

Amsterdam, the Netherlands: New research that uses an innovative approach to study, for the first time, the relative contributions of food and exercise habits to the development of the obesity epidemic has concluded that the rise in obesity in the United States since the 1970s was virtually all due to increased energy intake.

How much of the obesity epidemic has been caused by excess calorie intake and how much by reductions in physical activity has been long debated and while experts agree that making it easier for people to eat less and exercise more are both important for combating it, they debate where the public health focus should be.

A study presented on Friday at the European Congress on Obesity is the first to examine the question of the proportional contributions to the obesity epidemic by combining metabolic relationships, the laws of thermodynamics, epidemiological data and agricultural data.

“There have been a lot of assumptions that both reduced physical activity and increased energy intake have been major drivers of the obesity epidemic. Until now, nobody has proposed how to quantify their relative contributions to the rise in obesity since the 1970s. This study demonstrates that the weight gain in the American population seems to be virtually all explained by eating more calories. It appears that changes in physical activity played a minimal role,” said the study’s leader, Professor Boyd Swinburn, chair of population health and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention at Deakin University in Australia.

Although the study looked at the USA, we can assume it’s similar for NZ and Australia.

The scientists started by testing 1,399 adults and 963 children to determine how many calories their bodies burn in total under free-living conditions. The test is the most accurate measure of total calorie burning in real-life situations.

Once they had determined each person’s calorie burning rate, Swinburn and his colleagues were able to calculate how much adults needed to eat in order to maintain a stable weight and how much children needed to eat in order to maintain a normal growth curve.

They then worked out how much Americans were actually eating, using national food supply data (the amount of food produced and imported, minus the amount exported, thrown away and used for animals or other non-human uses) from the 1970s and the early 2000s.

The researchers used their findings to predict how much weight they would expect Americans to have gained over the 30-year period studied if food intake were the only influence. They used data from a nationally representative survey (NHANES) that recorded the weight of Americans in the 1970s and early 2000s to determine the actual weight gain over that period.

“If the actual weight increase was the same as what we predicted, that meant that food intake was virtually entirely responsible. If it wasn’t, that meant changes in physical activity also played a role,” Swinburn said. “If the actual weight gain was higher than predicted, that would suggest that a decrease in physical activity played a role.”

The researchers found that in children, the predicted and actual weight increase matched exactly, indicating that the increases in energy intake alone over the 30 years studied could explain the weight increase.

“For adults, we predicted that they would be 10.8 kg heavier, but in fact they were 8.6 kg heavier. That suggests that excess food intake still explains the weight gain, but that there may have been increases in physical activity over the 30 years that have blunted what would otherwise have been a higher weight gain,” Swinburn said.

“To return to the average weights of the 1970s, we would need to reverse the increased food intake of about 350 calories a day for children (about one can of fizzy drink and a small portion of French fries) and 500 calories a day for adults (about one large hamburger),” Swinburn said. “Alternatively, we could achieve similar results by increasing physical activity by about 150 minutes a day of extra walking for children and 110 minutes for adults, but realistically, although a combination of both is needed, the focus would have to be on reducing calorie intake.”

He emphasized that physical activity should not be ignored as a contributor to reducing obesity and should continue to be promoted because of its many other benefits, but that expectations regarding what can be achieved with exercise need to be lowered and public health policy shifted more toward encouraging people to eat less.

I completely agree with Boyd’s comments: both exercise and food are important but not too many of us can fit in a two hour walk each day. We don’t need deprivation diets, just some simple swaps – water instead of fizzy and sushi instead of burgers and chips. Let’s hope the school canteens who made healthy food changes to meet the last government’s guidelines continue to promote these foods. We can’t force people to eat healthy food but we can certainly make it easier for them to choose these foods.

What do you think?

Related:

Overeating to blame for U.S. obesity epidemic – Lack of Exercise is Secondary (ducknetweb.blogspot.com)

Overeating, not sedentary living, to blame for obesity epidemic (nationalpost.com)

Govt in NZ cuts off cash to obesity coalition

How to tips for great food photopics This amateur’s photos of food are sooo good

Research : diet more important than exercise See my post and take on this here

Crazy [foolhardy] energy drink diet About 80 tsps sugar a day, who knows how much caffeine and no fibre or vitamins. No wonder she got sick.

Women deliberately buy dresses that are too small as an incentive to lose weight, researchers have found.

Homemade jam making big comeback Yeah, great idea!

Growing herbs in winter – the raw beginner’s guide Another super how-to blog post from SMH with tips on growing herbs