Warning on snacks is just another silly scare story
YOU may have thought that the great dangers facing us as we enter 2018 are a possible war in North Korea, a hard Left-led Labour Party coming to power or the likelihood of further terror attacks.
But I bring you major news. The real danger that we face – the vicious enemy that we have to focus on taking out and destroying – is the Cheesy Wotsit.
Yes, Public Health England is at it again. In its latest contribution to an ongoing series – Leave It To Your Betters: Why You People Are All Idiots And Shouldn’t Be Allowed To Live Your Life As You See Fit – the ridiculous quango has issued its latest guidelines.
Public Health England (PHE) says that children are eating too many snacks. Those damned evil Curly Wurlies!
Yesterday’s news was full of PHE’s latest campaign, in which it demands that kids should be allowed only two snacks a day, each never more than 100 calories, to tackle the “obesity epidemic” as Dr Alison Tedstone, chief nutritionist at PHE, puts it.
Every new year the media falls for it. Come January (and many times in between), PHE brings out its latest scare story. And everyone falls in line, failing to note that this is what PHE does all the time and failing to look into what PHE is saying and why.
LET’S start with the “why?” Like any quango, PHE has to find reasons to justify its funding. There is nothing new about this. PHE’s modus operandi is to take public money specifically in order to scare the public so that the same public keeps giving it money. It is a form of perpetual quango motion.
PHE’s existence – and thus the jobs of those who work for it – is dependent on issuing blood-curdling warnings about how doomed we all are unless we listen to PHE.
Last year it warned that children are consuming so much sugar at breakfast that they are using up half their daily recommendation. A PHE survey found that children were eating 11g of sugar at breakfast – mainly through cereal.
Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? But that represents a paltry 44 calories. As for it being half PHE’s recommended daily sugar intake – that is because the recommended level was arbitrarily halved for no scientific reason. PHE has to come up with this rubbish because the moment it shuts up is the moment it loses its purpose – and its funding.
So not only does it repeatedly come out with these warnings, it also finds other ways to spend our money. Yesterday it began a series of TV ads (created by the brilliant and doubtless brilliantly pricey Aardman Animations) that will run for eight weeks. All paid for by you and I – to scare us about how doomed we are if we don’t listen to PHE and give it more of our money.
Take this week’s snack scare. PHE says: “Each year children are consuming almost 400 biscuits; more than 120 cakes, buns and pastries; around 100 portions of sweets; nearly 70 of both chocolate bars and ice creams; washed down with over 150 juice drink pouches and cans of fizzy drink.”
Oh, the sheer horror! But break down the figures. The average British kid is eating a bit more than one biscuit a day, then either a cake, bun or pastry twice a week, two portions of sweets in a week along with just over one chocolate bar or ice cream – and a sugary drink three times a week. Is that so horrific?
But what about the substance – that this is all creating an “obesity epidemic” that is taking hold in childhood? There isn’t one. You might find that hard to believe given how often you hear about it, but it’s simply not true.
Last year, the Olympic rowing champion James Cracknell remarked that North Korea and Cuba had got a “handle on obesity” because they are “quite controlling on behavioural trends”. Well yes, extreme poverty is one way of controlling weight as Venezuelans are also now discovering.
But while it seems you have to plunge your economy into collapse to reduce average weight, it’s plain wrong to suggest the opposite – that weight is rising in prosperous Britain.
Far from being an “epidemic” that is “spiralling”, as we are repeatedly told, the evidence shows that obesity rates have barely changed for a decade.
We are continually being told that obesity is about to soar. It never does.
AS Christopher Snowdon, the brilliant researcher on these matters, points out: “Back in 2007, the ironically entitled Foresight report predicted that 36 per cent of British men would be obese by 2015. But 2015 came and went with an obesity rate of 25 per cent, which is more or less what it was when the prediction was made.
“A slew of dodgy predictions have been made in the years since, so many that mere chance should have ensured that one of them would be right by now, but no. All the short-term forecasts have been proven to be wrong and all the long-term forecasts look deeply implausible. A number picked at random would have more chance of predicting future obesity rates than the computer models of the ‘public health’ industry.”
Even child obesity hasn’t changed much. It is pretty much at the same level it was at the turn of the century.
Yes, it is too high. Yes, many of us could do with losing weight (I am one). But no, there is no epidemic. And no, we are not harming our children by given them the odd sweet treat.
‘There is no childhood obesity epidemic’