Lunch box fussbucketry doesn't work! Fact.

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Today we've been inundated with the proposals to ban children having packed lunches:

Packed lunches could be banned and pupils barred from leaving school during breaks to buy junk food under a government plan to increase the take-up of school meals, which is to be announced on Friday.

The plan, drawn up by John Vincent and Henry Dimbleby, the founders of the food company Leon, aims to tackle the poor public image of school meals.

Now leaving aside the crassly illiberal nature of these proposals, we should note that this simply doesn't work as a strategy for improving child nutrition. How do we know this? Because, as Carl Minns points out, Hull City Council did just this by combining universal free lunches with draconian policing of the lunch box. And they asked Hull University to evaluate the effect. And they found:

The free healthy school dinners were not having the desired effect of improving children’s nutritional intake, children chose to eat the foods they liked and left the rest. Children who ate a free healthy school dinner went on to consume foods high in energy, fat, NME sugar and sodium later in the day and overall did not have a lower intake of these macronutrients than those children who had a packed lunch.

For adherents to the church of public health the proposals look good, sound good and get squealingly positive responses from sofa-bound BBC TV presenters. The problem is that - like most public health gimmicks they don't work.

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Quote - on feeding the poor

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From John Boyd Orr back in the 1930s:

‘It remains, however, to adjust our food policy so that the great wealth of food which we have or can produce will be brought within the purchasing power of the poorest. This is no easy task. It will require economic statesmanship of the highest order’.

The wonderful thing is that, thanks almost entirely to the food industry, we have achieved this aim in the UK. It is strange that the people who now praise Boyd Orr are the very same people who want taxes on sugar, salt and fat. Taxes that will make food less affordable for the poor.


Funny world!

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Salt is good for you - season those chips!

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We've known for ages that salt - the wicked and evil thing we must remove from our diet - is, in truth, a pretty benign substance at the levels most of us consume. And we also need it in our diet.

Slowly people are beginning to realise this - here's the New York Times:

With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.

Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit” is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time.

Got that folks - cutting down salt consumption isn't healthy at all and may even be dangerous! But - as that same NY Times article reports - the food fascists still resist the truth:

When several agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, held a hearing last November to discuss how to go about getting Americans to eat less salt (as opposed to whether or not we should eat less salt), these proponents argued that the latest reports suggesting damage from lower-salt diets should simply be ignored.

A classic public health response - we've seen it with the health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption, with e-cigarettes, with meat and with being  slightly overweight - faced with evidence that they might be wrong, the nannies simply ignore it and return to their discredited misrepresentation of the facts. Nothing can stand in the way of public health 'experts' controlling and regulating our diets - they are the ghastly successors of Douglas Jay:

‘...in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.’

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