Many of us are eating too much junk food, not getting enough exercise,
and are getting fat. Obesity contributes to premature death, serious diseases
and increasing health costs. The solution is to change features of the
environment that lead us to eat too much of the wrong foods and reduce our
physical activity opportunities.
There are plenty of misguided but well-meaning pressure groups in N.Z
society.
But few that can honestly be branded as plain stupid.
Amongst the top of the heap when it comes to share stupidity comes ‘Fight
the Obesity Epidemic’.
According to their religious like mantra espoused by FOE, N.Z should:
Stop the promotion of unhealthy food to children = cut advertising of
fast foods around the time children can see them, in case 10 year olds grab the family car and drive straight to Mc Donalds salivating the entire journey.
Having labels on food packaging, such as a traffic light system, so that
shoppers can easily identify healthy and unhealthy foods = demand manufacturers
of blatantly fat foods tell punters ‘This product is chocker block of crap’ when any simpleton knows this.
Introducing tax changes and/or subsidies to make healthy food more
affordable relative to less healthy food = Tax legitimate business’s for the
poor choices of a section their customers. Not all consumers of ice-cream for example are obese. No one in my family could be considered fat and we all enjoy ice-cream on occasion. To propose we should pay more for a product someone else abuses is clearly wrong. It's akin to taxing non-smokers.
FOE can’t seem to grasp the simple concept: people become fat because
they eat too much crap and don’t exercise enough.
There are no comparable campaigns to avoid certain foods in sub-Saharan
Africa and for good reason I might add.
That’s because the food they have access to in this region is often less
than that one needs to function.
In its base form food is energy.
Consume too little or too much and it’s adverse to one’s health.
So lets for a brief moment imagine N.Z adopting FOE’s Stalinist polices
when it comes to obesity.
KFC and even your ‘one dollar’ sweet mixtures from the local dairy would
be festooned with skull and cross-bones health warnings.
The price of a bottle of Coke would go up and the Government would
replace adverts for Burger King with the vegetable and fruit range at Fresh
Choice.
Adverts for Cadbury’s chocolate would appear in the back-pages of N.Z Truth magazine
beside those of an out-call massage.
The gapping hole in FOE’s campaign is that niggling factoid:
‘Fat people already know their over-eating is going to result in health
issues and premature death’
Fat people know what a good diet is, that pizza every night is not a
good thing.
Fat people know about the benefits of exercise.
They choose instead to ignore them and indulge in excessive often crappy
food.
Fat people can’t be fucked walking the dog around the block after work.
Nothing FOE proposes will change the mind-set of fat folk in New
Zealand.
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