Sunday 12 July 2015

Government diet fascists, why not just give us a ration book and be done with it?



The government doesn't want you to eat this - you know what they can do!

The government is about to issue new guidelines on a healthy diet. And it will come as no surprise to discover that the big target in this latest round of fussbucketry is sugar:

Adults and children should be instructed by the Government to halve the amount of sugar they consume and eat almost twice as much pasta, potato and other fibrous foods, an official report is expected to say this week.

This continues the almost daily assault on sugar as a source of energy in our diet - myths about how in some way refined sugars behave differently from naturally occurring sugars when we eat them to lies about direct links between obesity and sugar. Accompanying this, we're told there will be guidance on salt, fat and much else besides. Unsurprisingly alcohol gets a swipe from these diet fascists:

Healthy snacks included a handful of unsalted nuts and raisins one day and a plain scone with low-fat spread on another. Two glasses of wine were allowed during the week and deserts consisted of fruit most days. There was space for a small chocolate mousse one day, and a spiced rice pudding on Sunday.

And it's recognised that urging people to increase dietary fibre "would push most people above the Government's targets for salt, sugar and overall energy intake" - meaning that we end up with a diet stuffed full of vegetables.

Let's predict what will happen here. Firstly all the headlines will be about sugar with the myths and lies reinforced across the media. Stories (as with this story) will be illustrated with pictures of the evil white stuff further stressing the emphasis on sugar. Nice middle-class families will cut out the sugar replacing it with other sources of energy - fruit, bread, pasta and so forth. And then get surprised when they are neither slimmer nor healthier as a result.

At the same time government agencies from local council public health departments and GPs through to schools, hospitals and prisons will start enforcing the 'guidelines' as if they are hard and fast rules. Perfectly slim and healthy children will have chocolate bars snatched from their hands by teachers, hospital food will sink to new levels of utter uselessness, and hordes of clipboard-wielding nannies will fan out across the nation trying to force every establishment serving food to 'offer healthy options', remove salt and serve less sugar. Those cafe sugar dispensers will be banned as rufty-tufty builders have to fight with a rationed dollop of sugar in an inconvenient and wasteful paper sachet.

Meanwhile the triumphant fussbuckets will - even more shrilly than now - begin to shout about the need for a sugar tax or a soda tax. MPs will be inundated with deliberate misinformation from Action on Sugar while behinds the scenes that shocking liar Simon Stevens (who runs the NHS) will agitate a ministers for "something to be done" about obesity. And that something will be a sugar tax - despite there being no link between overall sugar consumption (which has fallen) and obesity.

This 'model diet' might be presented as guidance but it will quickly (as is always the case with government guidance) become a prescription adhered to, enforced and nudged into place by the army of nannying fussbuckets in government agencies and the charities those agencies fund. They might as well be done with it, issue us ration books so we comply with their approved diet and take any vestiges of please in food and eating away from ordinary people.

....

2 comments:

Curmudgeon said...

I thought the idea of a high-carb diet had been rather discredited as it was seen as something that encouraged diabetes. Last thing I read, saturated fats, especially those from dairy, were back in.

asquith said...

Doesn't it depend on the living conditions of the animals, with grass-fed beef and lamb and the dairy thereof coming out on top? And processed meats at the bottom. That is what I vaguely imagine to be the case. But then I was never one for listening to advice :)