From Your Health Journal…..”I finally found an opposing view on Fat Tax from The Independent in the UK, written by Simon Kelner. The article is called We are what we eat, and what we eat has to be a matter of free choice. We have been discussing here the issue over taxing food. Many felt like the government has no place telling us what we can and cannot eat, while others feel the government has the right, since it will cost them a lot of money in the future with ill individuals due to obesity – raising health care cost. This is going to be an ongoing issue over the next year, creating a lot of media stir. The author makes so many valuable points in his article. He writes, “By any measure, we are a fatter nation these days, and it is hard to argue against the idea that, if crisps, fried chicken and fizzy drinks were banned, or at least made harder to find, there would be an improvement in public health. But is this the right way to tackle the issue for a mature, liberal democracy? We are what we eat, and what we eat has to be a matter of free choice. Please take the time to visit the Independent web site and show support for Mr. Kelner’s article. I like some of his concepts.”
From the article…..
Apparently 60 per cent of the British population is officially obese – but does that mean we should add tax or make bad foods harder to find?
Nothing quite illustrates the extreme class divisions in Britain like our relationship with food.
Yesterday I turned from an interview with a woman called Lucy Boyd, who said that she regarded it as an offence against nature to eat asparagus out of season, to a report highlighting the significant rise in the number of people dependent on food hand-outs in the UK.
London has now become the global restaurant capital where you can pay £87 for a steak, but out there in the real world, people are eating “value” beefburgers that are made from horse. The glossy magazines are full of delicious recipes using seasonal ingredients, and the supermarket shelves are replete with ready meals and chickens at £2 each. One group of people wants food to be authentic, another wants it to be cheap. If we believe what we are told, obesity is a big issue in this country, and now a panel of doctors believes that the answer to this problem is to protect us from ourselves.
They want the government to add tax on fizzy drinks, legislate against unhealthy food in hospitals, and ban fast food outlets within waddling distance from school. Let them eat polenta, they might as well have said.
I was listening to a radio phone-in yesterday, which presented as fact that 60 per cent of the adult British population, and one in three children, is officially obese. This strikes me as a rather startling statistic, so I spoke to my regular adviser on medical matters who, for anonymity’s sake, I call Dr G. He said that this alarming figure may be a result of the standard measurement used to denote obesity, the Body Mass Index.
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