Ok, so I came across this LifeStyleExtra article whilst crawling through my RSS reader and couldn’t believe my eyes. We all know how bad the health situation in the country is at the moment, but, this really puts things into perspective. I even went to the liberty of making a graph in Excel (as much as I despise it!) to help illustrate the points made in this article. Check this out…
So, basically, LESS THAN ONE IN 100 BRITS (<1%) EAT A HEALTHY DIET! How is this possible, it seems like an utterly ridiculous number of people to be unhealthy? As illustrated above, only 0.8% (excuse the bolds but get used to them!) meet all their 5-a-days – DESPITE repeated marketing campaigns for healthy eating – sigh…
What worries me the most is how its common knowledge that eating unhealthily will lead to risk of chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease in later life. HOWEVER, Nutritionist Joanne Lunn believes changing the country’s eating habits will be a gradual process that will take generations to achieve. Is it me or will this be FAR TOO LATE?
This is even more worrying considering children are now showing even lower figures for healthy eating with LESS THAN 2% meeting TWO healthy diet daily targets.
It’s obvious that all the overweight images in the press are not scaring people off eating unhealthy, and, promoting healthy eating regimes ‘aspirationally’ seems to be pretty in-effective as well; as I believe it would appear as too great a challenge to achieve the image of a ‘healthy eater’ (as their illustrated) as an unhealthy eater.
Joanne Lunn makes some more very valid points (HURRAH!) and believes eating healthy is a mental hurdle. It goes right down to people knowing ‘what is a healthy diet’? We also need to change peoples perceptions of healthy food being more expensive (WHICH SIMPLY ISN’T TRUE) and get people to learn basic cooking and shopping skills.
BUT (BIG BUT), we can’t wait for generations to make this change, WE NEED TO ACT NOW!
Let me know if I’m missing something!
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This post was written by Warren Nash on August 28, 2008 |