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Health / Food / Blood Pressure (merged)

The thing is, everyone goes on about “diets” as if they are temporary measures.

It can’t be a temporary measure, it has to be a lifestyle change that lasts till you snuff it. Not just the right food, and avoiding eating to excess, but some physical activity, too – and it has to continue till the day you die (or are so old you can’t any more).

Food is only half the problem. Cars are the other half. Not 700m from our office, we have a very nice and popular lunch deli, which serves good fresh food and cheaply. Most people in the office will drive that 700m rather than walking , and it takes longer to drive once you’ve got the car out the car park, had to give way on 2 junctions, then slowly circulated around the car park at the other end hoping for a space. Cars have made us so lazy we’ve simply forgotten what these appendages are below our waist! Not only that, people start to think it’s abnormal to walk. Every so often someone will be at the shop and offer me a lift back, which I politely decline – and they look at me like I’ve just sprouted two heads, as if walking 700m is like climbing the north face of the Megapurna.

People are absolutely dead against any road space here being set aside for active travel. Whenever the DoI tries to make a proper Dutch-style cycle facility, the shrill opposition from motorists is deafening – even though everyone who leaves their car behind to make a short bike journey is actually making life better for the remaining motorists by not competing for parking spaces. It’s like the bucket of crabs, anyone tries to climb out and the rest of the crabs pull you back down in.

Getting people to start active travel is really hard; they all complain that “the weather isn’t suitable”, despite it never being too cold nor too hot here, and despite the fact that active travel doesn’t mean you now have to exclusively travel that way whatever the weather (although if people actually tried riding in the rain, especially in the summer, they would realise that it’s just very slightly uncomfortable for the first 2 or 3 minutes, then you don’t care and just get on with it; cars have made us incredibly weak).

Andreas IOM

This is quite funny. This is a cake mix. It shows how much sugar you eat when you eat a cake:

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I´ve heard people who want to ban sugar as a controlled substance, together with alcohol and other stuff. Well, we all remember how well the Prohibition turned out

Cake is not really something people eat every day though. The sugar concentration in certain drinks however is quite scary.

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

The thing is most people don’t want to eat large amounts of surgar. But it’s included in so many things that you wouldn’t expect or might think of as healthy.

I think it’s used as a cheap way to make a product taste nice. It can probably taste just as nice by using other less unhealthy products, but those are more expensive.

Personaly, I’d like to see a maximum sugar level which if exceeded, the product had to carry a health warning just like cigarettes.

Perhaps even a situation where if the sugar level exceeded a higher level, then the product had to carry only informational labels (eg a standardised font in black on a white background stating what that the product was, and a smaller font for the manufacturer name-but no logo). So you can still make and sell the product but marketing it is much more difficult. That would really encourage manufacturers to make their products with less sugar, but wouldn’t actually ban anything.

EIWT Weston, Ireland

Mooney_Driver wrote:

The sugar concentration in certain drinks however is quite scary.

Not only that. Check out the sugar content in some ‘health foods’ (muesli, etc) – IMHO these things should be in the hazmat aisle of a hardware store, not in a supermarket.

Without picking on any company in particular, when Macdonalds first came to France, by law they had to provide salad (meaning lettuce, in this case) as an alternative or addition to fries before it could get permission to open.
I don’t know if that is still the case but I also don’t understand why poor people would spend money on fast food when they can get much better food for less money.
I’m not sure this is the same in the UK as everything seems to be accompanied by chips/ fries.
Chips in France = crisps in the UK

France

when they can get much better food for less money.

In the US this is sadly not true. If you have very little money and several kids to feed, there is nothing cheaper than going to McD or similar. They compete heavily on price for basic stuff. Whereas buying good quality stuff – fresh fruit/veg – is eye-wateringly expensive. We did, so we know.

France is very different. No real idea for the UK recently.

LFMD, France

Two grilled fish tacos is cheaper than McDonalds nowadays – what incredible to me is how expensive McDonalds etc has become. Mexican food is by comparison inexpensive in the US and chosen wisely it is healthy. There are so many choices almost anywhere for anybody whose eyes are open.

It’s amazing how many people everywhere including the US live in a cultural and/or culinary bubble of their own making. It’s less pronounced in the US than in most places, but there is still a large group of people who know nothing about food except what their parents ate, or what is trendy with their inward looking group of peers (the ‘whole foods’ retail phenomenon) and/or what is widely advertised. I’d guess it’s mainly driven by fear, but who knows.

Last Edited by Silvaire at 19 Oct 16:24

Junk food is fairly expensive, but you don’t need to cook it, which is why people with what is called here “chaotic lifestyles” eat mostly junk food.

The biggest challenge with CV19 susceptibility is modern political correctness Secondary factors include the number of huge companies who make mostly crap food (Nestle is nearly 100% crap AFAICT).

France must have a similar % of poor people to every other country in Europe (or to the US), but they are a lot less visible (this is dangerous territory ). But the whole food culture there is clearly different. It’s always been very different, since I started travelling there in 1983. You could drop into the smallest cafe in the smallest village and get a nice meal, whereas everywhere else in Europe you would get stodge. But France has still not achieved any significantly different results in the CV19 battle, so clearly there are other factors in play.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

Junk food is fairly expensive, but you don’t need to cook it, which is why people with what is called here “chaotic lifestyles” eat mostly junk food.

Over 25 years the number of meals prepared in my home was probably less than two per year and at the end of that period I was spending $10 per day on food (total), unless I was on vacation or business travel. As a direct result of not having food in the house I was very thin and very healthy. You just need to choose what to buy and eat carefully, and even more so eat less of it. I’m now still fairly thin, but heavier: there’s lots of food around the house now.

(The chaos has since that period increased greatly, as it does when one marries )

Last Edited by Silvaire at 19 Oct 18:03
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