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.