Natural Selection

Just finished watching the new FoodMatters film “Hungry for Change” which you can watch absolutely free for another 5 days. It is a must see for anyone who is overweight or has ever tried to lose weight by dieting. The film presents some radical ideas about the nature of the food and dieting industry and how both of them actually promote weight gain. The food industry via the use of nutrient poor and addictive ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup, aspartame and flavor enhancers not only cause adverse effects on the body such neurological problems and bone demineralization but contribute to the addictive nature of these nutrient poor foods thereby causing weight gain.

The diet industry still promotes the idea of deprivation to the body which is never sustainable. In order to lose weight (and heal disease), the body truly needs nourishment and detoxification and a rebuilding of self love and self esteem. The film delivers some motivational interviews from experts in the field as well as everyday people who have healed themselves by nourishing themselves from the inside out.

So check out this gallery “Time” has published from the book “Hungry Beast”. It chronicles the amount and type of foods families from across the world purchase in one week. What I notice most is two things. The quantity of food varies significantly across countries (check out Chad versus Germany for example) and the more Western the family tends to be, the more processed the food choices become. The Americans, for example have very little fresh produce on their table whereas the family from Ecuador have nothing but fresh produce. It seems economic development comes with a price, more marketing, poor health and the environmental impact of all that packaging.

Check out the trailer from the documentary “Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead”

Another reoccurring theme I’ve noticed in the media lately; efforts by particular governments to make fast food less appealing to people. These include listing the sugar, salt and fat content on fast food packaging in NSW, removing the toy from happy meals in San Francisco
and generally having tighter restrictions on junk food advertising to children. There seems to be two schools of thought as far as efforts go to improve the nutrition of children thereby reducing the prevalence of obesity and associated illnesses. Whilst some people feel it is the responsibility of the government to remove the barriers to, and create a supportive environment for healthy eating others feel the entire responsibility rests with the parents.

Having worked in health promotion previously, I appreciate what a huge undertaking it is implement strategies to educate parents about how to provide healthy food for their children and how costly those strategies are, even if they are successful. Incidentally, the government only sets aside a miniscule amount of money for health promotion and most projects are funded by grants. When you consider the opposition health promotion workers are working against such as large advertising budgets, convenience, the addict-ability of fast food due to flavour enhancers and refined carbohydrates and socio-economic inequalities you may also appreciate what an enormous task it is. For example, a 2002 paper why Reidpath et al reported that there were 2.5 times more fast food outlets in the poorest socioeconomic areas than the wealthiest per head of population. It seems the government has a duty of care to be changing legislation regarding this industry especially when you consider that in NSW in 2007 overweight and obesity accounted for the most burden of disease in women (still 2nd to tobacco in men) and this comes with a treatment cost. This really puts the phrase ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ in perspective.

Two of the principles of the Ottawa Charter (the health promotion bible) are to ‘create supportive environments’ and develop ‘healthy public policy’. I would say these two principles fall firmly in the scope of governments to act resolutely towards changes in the fast food industry.

A survey of consumer group Choice and health groups such as the Institute of Obesity has concluded that food labels are confusing to consumers and that perhaps a traffic light system which ranks foods according to their fat, sugar and salt content would help them decide what is healthy.

A recent study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology which followed up the mortality rates of residents of the town of Sevesco in Italy, twenty-five years after a toxic explosion, has found an alarming trend. The residents, which were exposed to the toxic cloud of dioxin, and then to levels in the soil post-explosion, were grouped according to their exposure levels (very high, high and low levels of exposure) and then cause of death data were collected during that time. Those in the ‘high’ exposure  zones had significantly more deaths from lymphatic and hematopoietic (blood) cancers, diabetes and cardiovascular events (eg, heart attack), providing evidence that toxins in the environment do contribute to the diseases which were previously blamed purely on genetics and lifestlye risk factors such as diet, physical activity and smoking.