DT23005 Greatness - Not likely to be your destiny.

 James Marriot has nailed it once again with this Times Article examining the way the influence of Social Media has changed the behaviours of the new generation of under twenty year olds. Once again a highly perceptive and thought provoking article written by a young man whose thought processes far exceed his years.

 

So today I am capturing an article (04/05/23) from the Times Newspaper by James Marriott and copying it below with all the relevant Copyright acknowledgements. This is then followed with some notes I have made on the article. Then finally the link to the Times article is included at the end.

 

Copyright@James Marriot. Times Newpapers.  

 

Sorry, we can’t all be destined for greatness

Unrealistic pressure to be ‘special’ is fuelling an epidemic of unhappiness in younger people

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James Marriott @j_amesmarriott

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James Marriott

I spent much of the past week visiting various university campuses speaking to students. A poignant experience. Partly because I got to waft around other people’s arts faculties, remembering when I too had all that freedom and all that time ahead of me. But this was also the first time I noticed that generational differences now separate me from the current cohort of undergraduates. I was taken aback (and also rather charmed) by how many of my interlocutors eagerly offered me earnest, unprompted explanations of their neurological and sexual identities. I also noticed a new, intense atmosphere of personal ambition. Students fretfully explained that “side hustles”, multiple internships and strenuously cultivated hobbies were no longer the preserve of a hyper-ambitious minority but the basic criteria of success.

I think the new mood I detected might be described as an ethic of exceptionalism. In the 1950s, only 12 per cent of teenagers agreed with the statement “I am an important person”. Today, that figure is higher than 80 per cent. Two thirds of modern students believe themselves to be academically above average, compared with about half at the beginning of the 1970s. It should be said that self-belief is often an attractive trait and not to be deplored in itself — I was thoroughly charmed by everyone I spoke to. It is also true that the explosion of new sexual and neurological identities reflects a richer culture of personal expression. And nobody of a truly liberal sensibility can really object to that. But I do wonder whether these new freedoms of self-realisation don’t carry with them a pressure to be distinctive and extraordinary that is rather punishing.

Modern society puts an unprecedented and flattering emphasis on the potential of the individual. From every angle, our culture feeds our dreams of outstanding personal significance. A recent study found that the phrases “believe in yourself” and “express yourself” occur twice as frequently in modern books as in those published 50 years ago.

There is honour in the normal life well lived, its joys and tragedies 

Fantasies of specialness, uniqueness and non-conformity are the leitmotifs of all our media. The narcissism of celebrity culture, with its shallow celebration of looks and wealth, has been supplemented by social media which has diffused the pathologies of fame throughout society. Acting like you are uniquely important and interesting is regarded as obnoxious in ordinary social life. It is precisely the behaviour rewarded by platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.

In such an atmosphere, it is hardly surprising that few people admit to being normal or desiring a normal life. But you don’t have to travel very far past childhood to understand that there are few more potent recipes for bitterness and misery than a thwarted sense of exceptional destiny. And indeed, modern teenagers are unprecedentedly miserable. The majority of teenage girls — 57 per cent — “experience persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness”. Since the beginning of the century, anxiety has increased by more than 60 per cent in adolescent girls and almost 80 per cent in boys. Over that same unhappy 20-year span, depression has increased by 137 per cent in girls and 60 per cent in boys.

Smartphones have been blamed. So have the threats of generational inequality and climate doom. Both explanations are convincing. But I wonder whether at least some adolescent unhappiness might be attributed to the collision of dreams of personal distinctiveness with the banal reality of life, which rewards only a few with fame and recognition.

Indeed, anthropologists are long familiar with the fact that collectivist societies are often better at cultivating contentment than those that prize individual freedom — the reason rates of depression are lower in east Asia than in the West. I was intrigued by a recent study which found that the most unhappy cohort of all in the modern west was young liberal women. Liberalism, of course, is the ideology of the individual.

I think modern liberal societies are haunted by memories of the conformity of the 1950s. Society before the cultural revolution of the 1960s was much less individualistic but divergence from the era’s strict social norms was punished harshly. Homosexuality was illegal. Unmarried mothers were socially shamed. Women faced abysmally limited lives. But our enlightened horror of the illiberal past and the commendable modern instinct to celebrate nonconformity have prompted an overcorrection. “Normal” has become almost a synonym for failure.

The totemic text of my generation and the following one, Harry Potter, opens with a sentence explaining that the book’s unpleasant Mr and Mrs Dursley were “proud to say they were perfectly normal, thank you very much”. What more needs to be said? I was similarly struck reading my colleague Hadley Freeman’s excellent new book that she was tipped into the despair of anorexia by a friend’s comment that she wished to be “normal, like you” — a testament to the dangerous power of a once innocuous word.

We must rediscover the idea that there is honour in the normal life well lived. Fantasies of exceptional destiny are cruel enough for the exceptional few who possess the abilities to fulfil them but are crueller still for those destined for normal lives. And a normal life, with its normal joys, its normal disappointments, its normal tragedies, is the fate most of us can expect. As fates go, it is not so bad.

The End of Article.

Copyright@James Marriot. Times Newpapers. 

 

Blog Authors Comment.

James has identified in this one article a major social change which is affecting the new generation just leaving education and moving into work settings. Being normal is causing high levels of unhappiness in some cases leading to depressive illnesses in the young generation. The nature of work these days in a capitalistic society is contributing to this problem. Unfortunately, many work setting do not offer the stability of employment so necessary as you start to take on career, family and home making commitments. Property ownership, the bedrock of creating family stability, has become out of reach for most of the younger generation. At the same time being able to view other people’s lives has never been easier through the Smartphone and Social Media “lens”. The trend being to use Social Media to “show off” the good life being experienced by a select few. The failure is not giving a true perspective where most “normal” lives do not follow this idealistic digitally portrayed pattern of pure happiness.

The Government is failing to see what life is now like for the younger generation in the United Kingdom. It needs to see life in the 21^st Century in the United Kingdom from their perspective. Educational establishments, qualification authorities, employers, enterprise initiators, property rental and property ownership bodies all need to be brought into a “Think Tank” initiative to establish a co-ordinated approach to organising this phase in young people’s lives. I am not an advocate of a “nanny” state but leaving it all to a “free for all” will no longer meet their needs. Although capitalism is an extremely effective mechanism at managing many aspects of our Western Society it is incapable of meeting the needs of young people. Sadly they are becoming the victims of a free for all economy.

So how can things be improved without the state becoming too dictatorial? The academic world needs better aligning with the work needs of our society. But we still want to retain the capability to undertake pure research where these links to real work tend not to exist. In the United Kingdom the two class system of Universities and Colleges is failing to meet the needs of the younger generation. Even within Universities they have evolved further class structures with Oxford and Cambridge being the most elitist. They are included in the Russell Group consisting of an association of twenty four universities often portrayed as being the UK’s best universities. If you then consider the private school system with a prime objective of  feeding students into these elitist settings it does make being “normal” feel like you are left out in the cold. We haven’t even tried to acknowledge those entering the College system of education where many of the real work skills to support our society are developed in individuals.

So what is needed? Private and Public work providers need to be integrated into these educational settings. They should not just wait for a product, being a trained worker, to arrive at their door they should be integrated into their creation. Both Universities and Colleges need to develop specialisms by integrating employers into their workflow. Apart from pure research the educational processes should be aligned fully with the future nature of work. Students should be exposed to different types of work to help them appreciate what “work” will really be like when it becomes their daily routine. Sadly much of the work is routine and repetitive but with the progress of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based systems this is about to change. Employers also have duty to make work more satisfying for employees with the use of rotation of the boring work to aid stimulation. Career paths are also important tools to encourage engagement. But overriding all these is the need to offer employers financial stability so they can look to take on debt particularly in terms of mortgages upon which to build their “normal” lives.

So having looked to address the education to work pathway in people’s lives by increased integration both at the start for young people but also throughout their lives as work types disappear and retraining in different types of work become necessary. A particular problem for people in their 50’s plus where they can still need to find paid work for a further 18 years or so. The other big problem for the young is property ownership or more likely these days rental. The State Pension does not support a rental payment with those not owning a property required to seek Housing Benefits to keep a floor over their heads in retirement. It is in the Government’s interests to get people to look to use part of their income when young to buy a property thereby avoiding the need to find rent in old age. So the rental cycle has to be broken as early as possible in their lives with this now becoming a nearly impossible objective for young people. So what can be done?

The key is support for the first time buyer. Particularly the movement of the renter into a home ownership model. With those that pay a consistent rental model their conversion into this being a mortgage payment is vital. In London rentals are so high now whilst property prices exceed anything mortgageable by a young “normal” person. It is an impossible dilemma for young people. Living outside of London with the commute in daily like many do is even in itself unaffordable these days most young people. It all requires a radical new approach.

The Government finances a new build inclusive of a fast transit system into London. Although London is listed here it could be any city. The new build includes starter flats, small homes and larger family homes with an easy low cost upgrade path between them. The Government owns equity in the build which reduces in a way that allows the owner to build capital in the property over a 25 year period. But it avoids the stigma attached to social housing with these places built to be where people are keen to live with associated amenities including green space. It is like the “New Town” initiatives of the based upon the New Towns Act 1946 that established Development Corporations. These New Town Acts ran from 1952 to 1969 so the concept is well established legally. The difference proposed here is this is based upon the needs of First-Time buyers rather than being a more generic approach adopted by these Acts.

Those living in these almost “nursery first time buyer” settings can sell up and move back into the main stream property market whenever they feel able to do so. This then frees up spaces for new first time buyers. Whist retirement complexes meet the needs of the elderly in old age this approach meets the needs of young people starting out in life. It gives structure to this part of first time buyer life whereas now no such structure exists. Leaving it be a “free for all” is just creating frustration and unhappiness. It needs a “Think Tank” Government approach otherwise we are going to create real social problems based upon not supporting young people in terms of home ownership. Its time to act.

 

Times Newspaper article link below.

https://edition.pagesuite.com/popovers/dynamic_article_popover.aspx?artguid=87222418-8bcc-434f-92d3-9a9d43e68869

DT23004 Nostalgia - Sentimental yearnings from the past.

Just before we get into the subject of Nostalgia. I want to record here that today (9^th April 2023) that this is the first time I have used my new digitised approach to blogging. The change in approach was brought on by a heart attack on the 30th January 2023 and the realisation that if I had died everything would have gone in a skip headed for landfill with all my work lost forever. Just to say it is not blogging since I am not looking for an active readership nor the pressures of having to service such a readership. My blogging is how I record my DMB Publishing Knowledge Base for eternity. Google Blogger is just a very convenient and effective way to make digital records in the cloud for free.

So today I am capturing an old article (19/05/21) from the Times Newspaper by James Marriott and copying it below with all the relevant Copyright acknowledgements. This is then followed with some notes I wanted to make on the article. Finally the link to the article is recorded at the bottom.

Nostalgia

 

JAMES MARRIOTT

Why nostalgia beats living in the moment

Visiting our past is a rich and rewarding experience that helps overcome sadness and loneliness

James Marriott

Wednesday May 19 2021, 5.00pm, The Times

I have long understood that I am a chronic nostalgic. The nature of my condition makes me a sort of obsessive tourist of my own past: incapable of passing the vicinity of an old flat without making a detour to stand on the doorstep, and forever dragging pliant, unlucky friends on trips to once-frequented cafés and streets where I can pester them with questions that all begin: “Remember how . . . ?”

Nostalgia was first diagnosed in 17th-century Swiss mercenaries as “a neurological disease of essentially demonic cause”. Its reputation is no longer quite as infernal as that but it is still not considered entirely healthy. Our culture’s standard of mental good health is the ability to “live in the moment”. In the world of therapy, the psychological past has never been more old fashioned as symptom-focused treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy replace talking cures.

Having long viewed nostalgia as a personal lost cause, I was delighted to discover this month that a journal as thrusting and forward-looking as the Harvard Business Review believes it is a valuable workplace skill. Or, to quote the review’s wonderful jargon, a “self-regulatory existential resource” helpful for anyone hoping to “find the motivation needed to move forward with purpose and focus”.

This doesn’t go far enough. In our tendency to view nostalgia as a pathology, or even a useful but marginal emotion, we have gravely misunderstood ourselves. We are a species that moves in time. It is our tragedy and our privilege that we know this (as animals can’t) and the yearning for lost time is the most characteristically human emotion there is.

The poetry anthologies of any great literary tradition are not filled, as young readers first expect, with love affairs but with laments for lost time. The first great lyric poem in English (or, more accurately, Anglo-Saxon), The Wanderer, mourns the mailed warriors, mead halls and bright goblets that have vanished into the past “as if they never were”.

The Oxford English Dictionary organises words into “frequency bands” according to how often they are used. Band 8 contains the most frequently used words, mostly things like “the, an, from, with, but”. There is only one noun: time. I find this rather beautifully eerie. The great human obsession: time and its passing, hiding in plain speech.

Nostalgia has suffered by its reputation as an emotion for the senile but it is common in children as young as seven (recall, too, that in 2012 One Direction released a wistful song called Rock Me that begins “Do you remember summer ’09”). And while it is, yes, most frequent in old people, the next most nostalgic demographic are young adults; thinking about the past apparently provides stability in times of change. Unlike many emotions (such as shame) familiar only to certain cultures, nostalgia is universal in human societies.

The painful-joyful ambiguity of nostalgia (the “sweet sharp sense of a fugitive day”, Thomas Hardy called it), has made it hard to categorise or defend. Love or fear propel you all-too-obviously in one direction or another. But what is nostalgia telling you? Go back? You can’t. And if you could, would you want to?

Recent psychological research into nostalgia has tended to emphasise its importance to the human sense of meaning, a crucial factor in well-being associated with a lower risk of death. Through nostalgia we build stories about ourselves: where we’ve come from, why we’re here, where we’re going.

It is an emotion often connected with moping but scientists at Southampton University have shown we have the causality the wrong way round. People who are made to feel lonely or sad become nostalgic — and becoming nostalgic makes them feel better. That bittersweet quality appears to be related to the kinds of nostalgic stories we tell ourselves, which tend to begin with a sense of loss and develop towards redemption and a stronger feeling of “belonging and affiliation”. Wordsworth referred to “spots of time” by which our minds are “nourished and repaired”.

Nostalgia helps us redeem our pasts too. Reflecting nostalgically on my unhappy first years in London, I don’t think about the things that seemed so horribly important then — how lost and lonely and poor I felt — but about the summer evenings I spent sitting on my bed by the tall window of my old flat, reading and watching the fading sunlight.

Nostalgia cathartically reveals the insubstantiality of the past. A friend recently visited the Cambridge college which had rejected her ten years previously. All the academics who interviewed her had moved on, the students studying there were only children when she applied. Nothing of what had once felt a terrible failure really remained at all. Just a building. And her memory.

The most crucial sign of nostalgia’s importance is that it is one of the fundamental impulses of art. Philip Larkin, who was more honest about what he was up to than most poets, wrote: “I am always trying to ‘preserve’ things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.”

One of the sensations that reassures me that I’m really responding to a painting is the small shock of recognised feeling: the sense that something I had thought irrevocably lost has been found and handed back to me.

We are all stranded in time. The present, in which we are so frequently advised to live, is fleeting and trivial. Our pasts are richer, more filled with lessons and associations and meaning. We should spend more time there.

David Bannister

Comments

 

If you look at the Times readership feedback comments they are all positive firstly thanking James Marriott for his philosophical thinking then wondering how someone so young can have acquired this depth of thought and more significantly the ability to convey it in words and in the process stir emotions. It is the stirring of emotions through words that is his real gift. Like all brilliant journalists, although more a philosopher, James has caused readers to stop in their tracks and in my case choose to cut the article out for my future reference. As anyone who reads my blogs will appreciate I write between future, present and past or in terms of sequence more likely past, present and future. I often begin a blog with a past story. Then a present event stirring my imagination. Then a future prediction as to where we are headed. The past often covered in a very nostalgic way. My parents, Bill and Mary, had a very profound impact on my upbringing and who I am. Jenny my wife and children Helen and Alan similarly have impacted my life. Dear friends, many now departed, cause me to spend many nostalgic moments thinking back on times spent together. Fortunately in many cases for both family and friends my planning of times together in the future needs to ensure they are the right events to support my future nostalgic thinking. So what best supports nostalgic thoughts? The company, the setting, the food and taking the time to talk and listen. Oddly enough to plan the future and when you get there to make the most of the present so to guarantee it stands out in your nostalgic past. It does extend beyond just planning events it extends into financial planning and legacy planning. Not a subject some can face but planning for the life of those you leave behind after you have departed.

Times Link

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/9f13a78a-b8b1-11eb-9a91-c8c89595f50e?shareToken=64d5b9a929983d00f2ad786de7d15e67 

DT23003 Changing my eating habits.

 But just before I get onto the subject of eating habits. This “A Digital Thought” blog is trying to achieve just one simple objective. It documents anything that is currently residing in my consciousness that I consider worthy of recording for future reference and it does not fit into any of my other blogs. It also has another important purpose. Some of these thoughts will have been triggered by reading other authors materials. This is the only blog into which the full text written by other authors will be directly copied. All the other blogs are my written words and nobody else’s. Obviously being words not written by me then the all important copyright statement needs to acknowledge  both the writer and the publisher. Plus where possible links to the original source included in the blog. No room for any sort of plagiarism amongst my work. I want to encourage and rejoice those able to produce narrative that I enjoy reading and gains traction within my consciousness to the point that I choose add it to my blog. I am here to support them in their work and their careers and to acknowledge how their “writing gift” far exceeds my own abilities. I can only aspire to reach their professional heights. So let us now look at changing my eating habits.

Changing my eating habits.

Not surprisingly it has taken a life changing event to make me consider me changing my eating habits. A heart attack and open heart surgery to replace a faulty aorta valve. In truth I was not too unhealthy thus allowing the Surgeon to be willing to perform Open Heart Surgery on my 74 year old body and heart. No smoking, no drinking and reasonable amounts exercise brought me into the operable bracket of a likely success. Many are not so fortunate. But for some reason this “near miss” has made me want to make some adjustments to my diet and exercise patterns. Sort of an insurance policy approach to preventing another heart attack. But it has got to be just by a simple change to what I choose to put in my mouth rather than adopting any fancy new dieting fashion. But isn’t that what dieting is all about. Changing and reducing what you put in your mouth. So simple really!! So what is my proposed change of eating habit based upon? Maybe just changed thinking processes?

So what am I doing different? As the hand, fork or spoon comes up to deliver the food to my mouth I am looking at the food itself and thinking about it. Where was it sourced, where was it cooked and what is its content? The humble brussels sprout is the ideal first on the fork. Thanks to the Sainsbury’s packaging it was sourced from East Lothian, United Kingdom and grown by Fergus McKerracher. It was cooked in our kitchen after peeling off the dirty outer leaves and then boiled in unsalted water. Along with the sprouts is a cottage pie. The cottage pie has a mash with butter only potato topping with the meat base layer which was produced separately by boiling a stew like mixture of low fat beef with an added bag of mixed vegetables. It will be served with a cheese topping and a gravy made from factory created gravy pellets that are mixed with boiling water to make a liquid gravy. So is this a healthy meal?

It sounds like home cooking which is a good start. So firstly the sprouts. How were they cultivated? Consider the use of artificial fertiliser, pesticides and herbicides. Is it what could be termed an organic sprout or is it man manipulated by the addition of various treatments? The potatoes can be analysed in a similar way along with the the mixed vegetables. The lean beef becomes another story in terms of what have the beef cows been feed and more significantly what animal pharmaceutical drugs have they been bulk administered or individually administered through their lives. Agricultural animal pharmaceuticals is a big essentially hidden industry. Think of your vets bills and the cost of drugs within them. We then come possibly to the most industrially manufactured part of the meal the instant gravy pellets. It achieve their purpose they have to withstand long storage in the cupboard and then instantly, with the addition of boiling water, they have to become a tasty gravy. The gravy has to have a taste similar to the meat they accompany on the plate. (eg beef, chicken etc). With over 20 ingredients some just listed as flavourings it is easy to categorise this as a product of true industrial based food production with complex chemical components and associated processes to create it. Gravy is no longer made by the simple addition of flour and boiled potato water added to the cooked meat juices in the meat cooking tin which are then directly heated over the hob to produce what we call in our house a real gravy. Now we will not even analyse the pudding on a spoon to follow since fat and sugar will no doubt be the key ingredients to produce a comforting sweet treat.

So as you can see just by analysing what you are putting into your mouth by individual fork or spoon you can get an insight into your dietary behaviour. Now because you are using cutlery this is a good sign because it indicates at least this is loading your mouth with food at an allocated meal time. The biggest dietary problems arise when you are filling your mouth using your hand. The take away foods, snack bars, biscuits, drink cans and fridge snacks all being consumed in an uncontrolled way. The constant snacking and treating. These are certainly all the food types that have been industrially manufactured for mass consumption. All the marketing and merchandising are focussed on getting it into your mouth in every setting and situation. As you move from setting to setting each offering visual arrays and marketing posters of fast food you are encouraged to continually put in your mouth. You are captured inside various marketing traps each able to trigger your taste buds into believing you need to eat to reduce this urge telling you to take on that new taste. Or more likely to re-experience that taste that you have become addicted to by constantly feeding your mouth with it. You are now encouraged to repeat the experience. Nothing to do with being hungry or needing it. Just a repetitive cycle of pleasure seeking by way of the act of eating.

Also importantly do you focus on the negatives of being overweight and dying an early death from conditions you can easily avoid. Probably not when you are feeling well. You need to focus on the increased pleasure that a delay in feeding can bring by eating later at an allotted meal time. You think about the pleasure that eating later will bring and that eating now will instantly destroy this pleasure. Eating now just does not generate this type of satisfaction. You need to substitute other activities into the dreaming of food time frame. Like focussing on a hobby or undertaking exercise. You can substitute other none food related goals. Weeding a patch of garden, washing a car down or preparing a healthy home cooked meal for later. Preparing your own food is important.

Just like you can analyse the food on fork or spoon about to enter your mouth the food preparation cycle allows you a long time to give this full consideration. Firstly select your retailers carefully and enjoy a slow shopping experience. It is difficult to say avoid supermarkets because in many places they are your only choice. But try to use local vegetable shops and butchers. Farm shops are developing their niche in “low delivery mile” products sourced as locally as possible. Read all food packaging carefully ideally looking for very low lists of ingredients. A low ingredient list indicating it is nearer to the natural product. Take an interest in a variety of cooking recipes. Make an effort to consider having foreign foods. In many cases they can be tastier and a more healthy option. Their use of herbs and spices is likely to be much higher than those in our normal English foods.

Without a doubt all health experts recommend adopting the Mediterranean diet which instinctively we all know about but we don’t choose to apply being too tempted by what is being marketed at us by all the media. So vegetables especially green leafy ones, nuts, berries, beans, whole grains, fish, poultry,olive oil and surprisingly wine. So avoid red and processed meats, butter, cheese, sweet foods like pastries and cakes and fried fast food. But the single most important dietary change is to reduce sugar. Don’t substitute the older generation artificial sweeteners because they upset your gut bacteria which is linked to the brain. Try the newer natural sweeteners that have zero calories like stevia, allulose and monk fruit. You must slash your salt input which causes high blood pressure which in turn raises the risk of cardiovascular disease with heart attacks and strokes. Remember salt is hidden in processed and restaurant foods. Drinking water rather than eating is another strong recommendation. Although this one I have particular difficulty achieving. Not a water drinker!!

But everybody will tell you that changing diet alone will not improve your health. It has to be undertaken in parallel with some exercise regime along with a focus upon breathing exercises. There is a good reason that the medical profession always groups the heart and lungs together organisationally. They are very closely dependent upon each other. The lungs getting the oxygen into the blood that the heart then pumps around the body and brain to feed all your cells. But don’t think all exercise has to be strenuous to be effective. Yoga practice and meditation can be just as effective. Two other important areas to focus upon are getting enough sleep and keeping your teeth in a good condition. Yes your teeth are very important.

So what habits will I be changing? Have you the reader been encouraged to change your diet? Don’t wait for that heart attack or stroke to change your thinking. Do it now.

DT23002 The dangers from industrially produced food.

 

Source and Copyright : Henry Dimbleby, Times Newspapers. 

Once again I have to use an article copied directly from the Times Newspaper (25/03/23) to communicate my thoughts on this subject. None of my written words could even match the journalistic skills of Henry Dimbleby. So why blog it ?. Well it is then stored in my knowledge base, that is one of my many blogs, so I can easily find it in the future. Having recently experienced open heart surgery to replace a faulty aorta valve this is a very relevant article to me. Having witnessed first hand the number of patients on the heart and lung hospital ward you can see this is a growing problem. Many of these patients were in very poor general physical health. Whilst the hospital menu was still including many very sweet puddings. As a menu it certainly had not been adjusted to be one based upon a healthy diet and it was more aligned to normal patient expectations.

 

Our food system is creating a huge health crisis yet politicians are too worried about nanny-statism and too in thrall to business to act, says Henry Dimbleby.

 

What do you think is the biggest cause of avoidable illness and death in this country? Smoking? Drinking? Drugs? Wrong on every count. The thing that is most likely to kill you before your time is the very thing you need to stay alive: food.

Not all food, of course. Not the kind that, even now, springs to mind when we imagine sitting down to eat: something freshly made, from recognisable ingredients, in a kitchen, by a human. But most of the food eaten in this country is nothing like that.

Ultra-processed food — meaning a packaged product, generally high in calories and low in nutrients, containing unfamiliar ingredients that have been through multiple stages of industrial processing — makes up 57 per cent of the British diet. We eat more of this stuff than any other European nation.

More than 80 per cent of the processed food sold in the UK is so unhealthy that, under World Health Organisation guidelines, it is considered unsafe for marketing to children. It doesn’t do adults any good, either. Our diet of cheap, sugary, fatty food is making us pile on the pounds. Sixty per cent of adults in this country are overweight or obese, and by 2060 that proportion is expected to reach 80 per cent.

The side-effects of obesity include depression, anxiety, infertility, high blood pressure, painful joints, breathlessness and broken sleep. That is before we even get to the big ones: cancer, dementia, heart failure and type 2 diabetes, which has its own attendant risks of blindness, peripheral neuropathy and limb amputation. By 2035 the NHS is expected to spend more on treating type 2 diabetes — just one of the multitude of illnesses caused by bad diet — than it does on all cancers today. Already, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates that the UK economy loses £74 billion a year in reduced workforce productivity, shortened lives and NHS costs because of conditions related to a high BMI.

It is extraordinary that there is not a public uproar about this. Imagine if a novel virus started killing and disabling people on such a scale, and with no end in sight. You don’t have to imagine it: we know how far politicians and the public will go to combat such a threat. Unlike Covid, however, the plague of dietrelated disease has crept up on us stealthily, under the seductive guise of “choice”. Our food system has slid into dysfunction, taking our bodies with it. This change has been sufficiently gradual to lull us into a kind of helpless submission. No matter how bad the headlines, the British public (and political class) can’t seem to muster an appropriate level of fear. Instead, we recoil instinctively into what we believe to be “common-sense” solutions. Too often, those solutions are not just wrong but counterproductive.

Between 1996 and 2020 successive governments introduced 689 different policies intended to halt our national weight gain. Yet we keep getting fatter and sicker. This is because such policies nearly always come at the problem from the wrong angle. They start from the assumption — shared by most in this country — that dietary ill health is chiefly an issue of personal responsibility; that the answer must be to educate the masses in healthy eating, encourage us to exercise and leave the rest to individual willpower. This feels like common sense. We know our bodies grow or shrink depending on what we put into them and feel a rush of impatience at the idea of blaming “the system” for our expanding waistlines. Surely it is up to each of us to take responsibility for what we eat?

This line of thought fails to address the sheer scale of the problem. In 1950 under 1 per cent of the UK population was clinically obese. Today, the figure is 28 per cent. Are we to believe that, in the intervening years, the population has suffered a massive collapse of willpower? Of course not. Humans have not changed. The food system has.

Many people find it hard to imagine that a food “system” really exists, let alone that it could be shaping their behaviour. The purpose of my new book, Ravenous, is to lift the lid on that system, to show how the vast, complex, strangely invisible machinery that feeds us actually works, and what it is doing to us and our planet. Seventy years ago it was widely assumed the world was on the brink of running out of food. The global population was rising fast — projected to increase from 2.5 billion to nine billion over the coming century. How could all these people be fed?

The so-called Green Revolution saved the day. Scientists developed new, higher-yielding crop breeds. By combining these with artificial fertiliser, pesticides, herbicides and high-tech machinery, farmers could generate much bigger harvests. As expected, the global population boomed. There are eight billion people on the planet today yet the threat of mass starvation has receded. Globally, we produce around 50 per cent more calories per head than we need. (Much more if you include the crops we feed to livestock to get meat.) Now that revolution’s side-effects are beginning to kill us. The environmental costs of the modern industrial food system are staggering. It is the number one cause of global deforestation, drought, freshwater pollution, soil degradation and biodiversity collapse.

After the energy industry it is the biggest cause of climate change, responsible for 25 to 30 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. All this, in turn, poses a grave threat to the food system. Unpredictable weather events, poor soil, the decline in pollinating insects, drought, floods, rising sea levels: these are by far the biggest dangers to our food security (bigger even than President Putin’s war in Ukraine). Climate change is already affecting agricultural yields. The parched summer last year produced dismal harvests in Europe. In Italy the worst drought for 70 years led to a drop of about 45 per cent in corn and animal feed crops. In France maize crops were 28 per cent below forecasts.

More recently we’ve seen how a freak cold snap in Spain and Morocco led to vegetable shortages here, exacerbated by a peculiarity of our local food system. UK supermarkets buy most of their produce on fixed-price contracts in order to offer cheap products at stable prices to consumers. They are reluctant to pay more for produce, even when it is in short supply. In continental Europe supermarkets responded to the shortages by paying over the odds to wholesalers, outbidding UK retailers. This meant passing on higher prices to their consumers, which in turn reduced demand — but their shelves were full. I was sent a photo of shrink-wrapped cucumbers, packaged and labelled for a UK supermarket, for sale in a market on the Costa Brava. The producer had simply followed the money.

However, the fundamental threat to our food security is environmental. Our rapacious food system is destroying the ecosystem upon which it depends.

And then there is the damage being done to our bodies. Biologically, we are hunter-gatherers. If you have to search for everything you eat, it makes sense to look for things that give you more calories than you expend. When we eat honey, for example, our taste buds respond with intense pleasure: a natural feedback mechanism to reward us for finding such a bountiful source of energy. The same is true of chocolate ice cream. It contains six times as many calories as broccoli and our appetite for it is correspondingly powerful.

This craving is strongest when fat and sugar are combined in a ratio of 1:2, the ratio in breast milk. Food manufacturers use this formula in products such as ice cream, milk chocolate and biscuits, knowing we find it irresistible. Even allegedly savoury products such as ready meals are often doused with sugar and oil to give them a “moreish”’ flavour. Processed food tends to be low in water and insoluble fibre. This is known to slow down the body’s “satiety” signals, the feeling of fullness, so we eat more of it. Because each mouthful is more calorific (and less nutritious) than a mouthful of broccoli the consequences of eating just a little bit more are greater too.

As well as being easy to sell, this kind of food is cheap to make. The Green Revolution has created an abundance of sugar, flour and vegetable oil. So companies have a financial incentive to develop and promote foods that chiefly use these ingredients. They do so not just to capture a bigger slice of the market but to grow the market itself. Young marketeers are taught about the “consumption effect”: people who have more food in their home will eat more of it.

In-store promotions such as the classic “bogof” deal (buy one, get one free) are explicitly designed to persuade shoppers to buy more than they intended.

Chocolate has an “expandability” of 93 per cent, meaning if you run a bogof on chocolate, customers will on average consume almost twice as much as they would have without the promotion.

The average Briton now consumes five times more crisps than in 1972. We eat 1.5 times as much breakfast cereal (which has become far more sugary). You only have to cast your eye around your local supermarket, where fresh ingredients form a thin coastline around the great landmass of processed, packaged food, to see how the consumer landscape has changed.

Confectionery alone — a small section of the processed food market — is worth £3.9 billion. By contrast, the entire fruit and veg market in the UK is worth £2.2 billion per year.

“ Side-effects of obesity include depression, anxiety, infertility, high blood pressure, painful joints, breathlessness and poor sleep

The bigger the market, the greater the economies of scale. Highly processed foods are, on average, three times cheaper per calorie than healthier foods. This is one reason why bad diet is a particularly acute problem among the poorest. How we eat is one of the clearest markers of inequality. A diet of cheap junk food has the peculiar quality that it can make you simultaneously overweight and undernourished.

Children in the poorest areas of England are both fatter and significantly shorter than those in the richest areas at ages ten and 11. (The average five-yearold in the UK is shorter than their peers in nearly all other high-income countries.) Dietary ill health is a major reason why, at the height of the pandemic, people in the most deprived areas were twice as likely to die from Covid. Even before then, the upward trajectory of life expectancy in the UK had begun to slow and, in some areas, go into reverse. Women in the most deprived 10 per cent of neighbourhoods in England now die 3.6 months younger than they did in 2010. Their life expectancy is 7.7 years shorter than that of women in the richest areas. The differential for men is 9.5 years. For “healthy life expectancy” — the number of years a person spends in good health — there is a gap of 19 years between rich and poor.

The problems created by our food system are too enormous and too entrenched to fix through individual willpower alone.

Government intervention is required. But politicians are extremely nervous about interfering in matters as personal as what we eat. They are easily intimidated by noisy libertarians, within their own parties and in the media, who punish any whiff of nanny-statism. And they are susceptible to scaremongering from industry lobbyists who fight hard to maintain the multibillion-pound status quo.

Food company bosses have mastered the art of polite intransigence, making sympathetic noises about doing the right thing while refusing to do it. Any politician who attempts to force through change using legislation will be visited by a stream of hand-wringing chief executives assuring them, in tone of regretful pragmatism, that such a law would wipe out their profits and put an irreparable hole in the economy.

I recently left my role as lead non-executive director of the Department of Food and Rural Affairs because I can no longer swallow my frustration. There are so many things the government could do to shift the food system on to a better track. (For a full list, please do read my book.) Far from endangering the economy, acting now would prevent us sliding further and further into ill health, low productivity, dwindling tax receipts and a health service so overwhelmed by dietrelated disease that it sucks the national coffers dry.

Instead, we are paralysed by political indecision. No, worse — we are going backwards. Having promised in 2020 to bring in restrictions on junk-food promotions and advertising to children, the government has now “delayed” this until the next election. If it can’t even bring itself to enact this fairly modest — and hugely popular — policy, what hope is there for wider systemic change? Part of the difficulty is that responsibility for food policy is spread across multiple, often competing, government departments. Too often, these departments end up acting as client states for the industries they represent. It is up to the Treasury, for example, to decide whether food companies should be taxed on the sugar they put into processed food. (This was one of the recommendations I made in the National Food Strategy, an independent report for the government published in 2021.) The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport decides whether, and when, the advertising of junk food to children should be restricted. The Department for Education decides who is eligible for free school meals. And the Department of Health and Social Care is left to clear up the mess.

Bringing together these fiefdoms in order to force through reform requires strong, consistent leadership at the top. The political tumult of recent years has made that impossible. And yet the system is fixable. In fact, change is inevitable. Sooner or later, the damage done by our current food system will become politically and economically unsustainable. The question is: how much suffering are we prepared to inflict on ourselves before we intervene? Do we really want to wait until a crisis becomes a catastrophe?

£3.9bn Value of the confectionery market in the UK per year

28% of the population is clinically obese (1% were in 1950)

80% of processed foods sold in the UK are considered unsafe for marketing to children, under WHO guidelines

£2.2bn Value of the entire fruit and vegetable market per year

 

 

DT23001 Is Tiktoc lowering our intellectual capabilities ?

Source and Copyright : James Marriott. Times Newspapers.

See below a Times Newspaper article written by an excellent up and coming journalist called James Marriott. James has his own unique style of writing which is very representative of a younger social media influenced approach to topical subjects. It has raw honesty and tackles issues in an upfront manner whilst retaining some delicate humour. Although a Times Journalist, so one assumes reasonably well paid, he obviously experience’s first hand the tough economic reality of working and living in London, United Kingdom. In truth I normally like to always add my own views on the subjects these articles cover but I have to admit that in Jame’s case he does such a good job that there is very little I can add or challenge without detracting from the messages he very effectively communicates.

James Marriot Times Newspaper Article

The most depressing news of the past week was not that the Chinese state may be using TikTok to steal the data of our top journalists, civil servants and MPs but that so many of them had downloaded the app in the first place. The revelation that the country is run by an elite that has voluntarily submitted itself to a cultural diet of inane viral dancing and lip-sync videos is enough to turn one into a populist of positively Trumpian fervour.

TikTok is deservedly acquiring a sinister reputation. But the greatest political threat the app poses is not to the private data of government officials but to our minds. Its frenetic algorithmic video feed represents a gear change in the accelerating inanition of our political culture. This is not to grouchily denounce the latest new fangled thing the kids are doing, but to acknowledge that the successful functioning of a democracy benefits from mental habits associated with a literate society.

Liberal democracy is the creation of a literary culture. The birth of modern democracy in the 19th century coincided with the advent of mass literacy. Our democratic institutions are the products of a society in which the values of print culture were ascendant. The principle of the free press requires that political argument is carried out at length in newspapers, magazines and books.

Parliamentary debate began as a form of what has been called “printed orality” — ie debaters addressed one another with the length and complexity of written texts.

The media theorist Neil Postman pointed out that the American founding fathers assumed that “mature citizenship was not conceivable without sophisticated literacy”. It was taken for granted by the pioneers of modern democracy that the success of the system depended on a culture in which citizens possessed certain distinctively literary virtues: the ability to concentrate on complex ideas, to critically evaluate arguments, to pay sustained attention to an opponent’s arguments and to cultivate empathy with different points of view.

Students can no longer engage with a difficult book like Middlemarch

It is often said that smartphones are “rewiring” our brains but neuroscience suggests that it is books not phones that most intriguingly alter the mind. “Our predisposition is to shift our gaze, and hence our attention, from one object to another, to be aware of as much of what’s going on around us as possible,” writes Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows. The deep, uninterrupted concentration fostered by print is a “strange anomaly in the history of our psychological development”.

Reading creates empathy too: brain scans show that “readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative”. The material does not have to be intimidatingly highbrow.

Engagement with any long text cultivates “silence, solitude, and contemplative attitudes”, the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein writes.

Carr says: “Whether a person is immersed in a bodice ripper or a Psalter, the synaptic effects are largely the same.”

Now that sales of fiction are in long-term decline and Instagram is the most popular source of news for teenagers, the political benefits of a print culture are imperilled. We are increasingly reluctant to engage with complex texts. One university lecturer I spoke to recently said she had resigned herself to the fact that she would never again teach George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch. Her students are no longer able to engage with such a long and difficult book.

Another academic tells me he habitually approaches classic texts through their TV adaptations.

For a while, the popularity of Twitter, Facebook and blogs seemed to represent the survival of at least an etiolated form of literary culture.

In fact, digital media is becoming more visual and less literate. Image based apps such as TikTok and Instagram cannot even support debates of the quality of Twitter.

Politics on such sites is carried out through assertion rather than argument. Slogans and political memes such as the blacked-out Instagram squares that were supposed to advance the cause of anti-racism at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement or the ubiquitous twee cartoons of the Queen that accompanied her death are symptoms of a public discourse approaching the level of mere propaganda. MPs no longer worry how their speeches will appear printed in newspapers the next day but whether a sassy or outraged clip a few seconds long might go viral online.

Literary culture is inherently liberal. The solitary reader is an individualist engaged in the reasoned contemplation of different ideas and perspectives. The increasingly visual culture of social media is fundamentally illiberal, promoting groupthink and trivia. In Britain, the most online generations are the ones most sceptical of democracy.

Liberal democracy is not an inevitable political fact. It is the product of particular historical and cultural circumstances. If this sounds alarmist, reflect on the trajectory of the world’s democracies since the launch of the iPhone in 2007. Or consider the historic hostility of autocratic and totalitarian states to books. Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany silenced their best writers and thinkers because it is not just subversive ideas that are threatening to autocrats but the very habit of complex thought itself. Social media in China is a frivolous confection of animal videos and dance trends. There is little debate. It is better for the regime that way.

And as for western democracies? Well, we do not yet know how easy it is to run one in a culture that prizes the viral video over the book.