The choice of news consumers to read the mail, express, sun and telegraph whilst watching GB news is definitely unhealthy.
We have a system that costs a lot of money to keep people poor. People should be able to eat nutritious food, but they are trapped in a cycle of poverty, lacking knowledge, time and money. Parents who can’t cook and spend all their time working jobs that don’t pay enough, bring up kids who can’t cook etc. In my younger years, if you had a job you generally had enough to live on to at least a basic standard. No longer true The rich getting richer is an utterly pointless achievement for humanity John Bird of the Big Issue has been advocating policies that give people a hand up out of poverty, rather than a payment to keep them there, for years
They are creating demand for the service they provide, which is different Why aren’t people educated to make better choices and paid enough to be able to afford them? Why doesn’t government implement policies that actually acknowledge the current health/obesity crisis? Because they are in the Food lobbies pockets maybe?
Food/Health/Obesity is a topic close to my heart (pun intended). I have mentioned on here before that I have lost 30lbs over the last 10 months or so, through a healthier diet, exercise and a bit of willpower. However, what prompted is all was an annual private medical I had. I thought I was ok, but apparently i was at 13 stone for 5" 8' I was obese with a 80% chance of becoming diabetic. I embarked on a hybrid Keto diet and 40-50 mins of exercise classes a day. All good news you I say, except if it wasn't for the fact that my PRIVATE medical highlighted it and I am fortunate not to have to choose between food and heat, I could do it. It has been expensive, and I worry that others may know their issues, but are not in the situation to do anything. This is where the government need to step in. Healthy choices should be available to all, not just those whose company sends them for a medical. Healthy food should be as accessible as the fast food junk - taxing fast food isn't the answer as the over worked will always choose it over 'slow food' due to the time constraints.
Sorry but going off topic but you mentioning the time thing reminded me of when they reopened after Covid and there were like 2 hour+ queues for the drive throughs to get 'food' that barely fills you up for ten minutes Astonishing tbh. Can't help but feel the world would be a better place if all those people were shot with a shotgun at point blank range.
Apparently, the 'most' important part is your waist - the size across your belly button, breathing out. Mine was 37", is now 32.5"
Not just for the obvious risks of heart disease and Type II Diabetes either, research has shown links between belly fat in men and dementia.
For what it's worth, and I appreciate this will be deeply unpopular, but I don't think you can attribute the high rates of obesity purely to capitalism or poverty. For the most part people are insanely overweight for similar reasons to people are drink or drug addicts, it's because they lack self worth and a willingness to improve themselves. If you're 20 stone plus because you're excessively eating/drinking every day and never leave your house then you're a drain on society in the same way that heroin addicts who spend all their time begging and stealing are a drain on society I want to emphasise that this clearly isn't all people in this category but it doesn't do society any favours to pretend these people don't exist. I've been there myself, around 5 years ago I spent months sniffing cocaine 4/5 days a week and racking up a **** ton of debt. I wasn't a drug addict because of capitalism or dem nasty Tories but because I liked taking drugs and didn't care enough to make a change. It's even worse for children. How many parents make a conscious effort to ensure their kids give enough exercise? Or do they stick them in front of a tablet from age 3 as it's easier for them and all they want to do is sit in front of Netflix or on their phone? There's a cultural thing here too. I grew up in the 90s and from the age of about 8 I was out the house with my friends pretty much every single day and it would be all day at weekends but that doesn't really happen now. Why? I believe a big part of it is that there wasn't the fear of nonces back then in the same way but it also runs deeper than that imo. Either way the outcome is that obese kids in my school were the rarity and that clearly isn't the case anymore. This turned into a bit of a rant lol but my point is that it's far too simplistic to say the big increase of obesity is due to poverty etc when there's a lot of contributing factors such as the rise of technology/social media and the increase of people who won't take responsibility for themselves or their children (and those 2 things are directly linked imo) . Other things definitely need addressing of course but that doesn't mean we shouldn't call out people who come under the above categories.
One of the corollaries of the rise of Ozempic etc is that we're getting a good sense that a lot of obesity is straight-up hormonal. Not all, certainly, but if people suddenly lose a considerable amount of weight simply by taking a medicine that alters the way one's body processes blood sugar, then the problem can't really be chalked to effort. I have always been on the opposite end of the spectrum. I weighed in the 135-145 lb range at 5'10" until well into my 30s, and it had nothing to do with self-discipline...I have a pretty damned addictive personality. I was relatively active and had a fairly high metabolism, but mostly I just had a really low hunger response: I could comfortably go 24 hours without eating and never feel the sort of hunger that a lot of people describe if they simply don't eat a meal on time. Which had its own complications (turns out that a diet of black coffee, spicy foods and cigarettes while getting much of your food in a single meal per day isn't ideal for your gastric system), but my ability to do so was purely physiological.
This is well worth a look, the excellent John Sweeney and Byline TV investigating the link between Johnson and the Lebedevs:
You are 100% correct and this is why I hate the majority of the left wing mindset. Take some ****ing self accountability and responsibility in life. People want to outsource their bad decisions and sponge off taxpayers.
It is by far the best system humans have ever invented to organise themselves. It is responsible for most of the good things you have in your life. Every single other system we have tried has resulted in much worse conditions for the poor than capitalism. You need to study more politics & history
Greg your post here added absolutely nothing to the discussion other than try and attack me lol. Hope you enjoy your 6th covid booster and your myocarditis
There are some insidious factors at play here, though. The cheapest ingredients are generally worse for you. An example: when health conscious people moved more and more to milk with fat removed, there was a glut (and there still is) of cream. At one point in bulk it was about a penny a litre. As any cook will tell you, add cream to pretty much any food and it will taste better. So, what did food companies do? They added it to low-end foods. Better taste, cheaper ingredients. Thus, the long-term effect of people drinking 'healthier' milk was to move fat intake from people who care about their health into the diets of people who eat pre-prepared food (predominantly worse-off and less educated people). These people aren't eating more or feeling fuller, they're just bunging down meals that food companies have made worse for them because it's profitable. Everyone in this scenario is behaving rationally yet weight is going onto the waistlines of the time and/or money poor. And it doesn't take a huge amount of extra calories to pile on weight. There are about 3,600 calories in a pound of fat. Eat an extra 50 calories a day (about two teaspoons of cream) and you'd put on 5lb a year, a stone every three years, six stone between age 20 and 40. So, by eating pre-prepared food daily that has had a tiny bit of cream added you could bang on six stone without ever feeling fuller or eating more food. There's also huge evidence that willpower doesn't actually work when it comes to food. There are other factors at work. Take the bacteria from obese mouse guts and put them into normal mice and the mice become obese. I'm not saying this or cream is the root cause, just that it's not as simple as it sounds. I suspect there'll be advances in medical knowledge in this area and that solutions will be found but I'm not sure that it's all just a lack of willpower once you look deeper. Vin
That is bollocks. Capitalism in its simplest form is the free exchange of one service for another. It was not designed for mass production- and the consequent accumulation of wealth by a minority. When wealth was merely I do this for you and you do that for me and this coin represents that, it was a very slow diverting of rich and poor. In those days physical violence delineated rich from poor. The violence of the overlords. Now we are subjugated by the money itself. People can earn a thousand man hours in a minute without doing a thing. That is speeding up the wealth gap. There are middle grounds between unfettered capitalism and totalitarian communism. I don’t know why you keep assuming everyone else is stupid because they have different ideologies. Some of the smartest people in history have been socialists and some of the smartest have been free market economists. There is a road to walk between them. But unfettered capitalism will only lead to inequality and rising unhappiness.
The truth is that junk food is the opiate of the masses. No religion. No hope. A hamburger makes me feel better about my ****ty life for ten minutes. It feels cheap (but it isn’t). We have been blaming the poor for their ‘stupidity’ and ‘depravity’ and their ‘alcoholism’ and their ‘obesity’ for a thousand year. Poverty is a sinkhole that removed your will to be anything at all.
