News Just In: Government Hectoring Not Having Any Effect!

People are eating as badly as they were 10 years ago despite hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money being spent on healthy-eating campaigns, the Government's food watchdog admitted yesterday.

So that was all yet another pouring of money down the drain, wasn't it? Still, it kept a few quangos in business, and who is to say that wasn't the idea all along..?

A nationwide nutrition survey for the Food Standards Agency (FSA) revealed that the majority of Britons are still eating too many processed foods and sweets and not enough fresh fruit and vegetables.

According to whom? I don't know about anyone else, but I rather figured when I grew up, I'd leave nannying behind...

Alison Tedstone, the FSA's head of nutrition research, said: "Overall, these results show that the diet of the population has not changed much since 2000. We are still seeing lots of people not achieving the recommendations for macronutrients, but there have been some suggestions of positive improvements."

They are recommendations, Alison. That means that people don’t have to take notice of them if they don’t want to. Look it up in a dictionary sometime…

Mind you, this news simply encouraged the usual control freaks and authoritarians to crawl out of the woodwork...

Richard Watts of Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming, said: "After 10 years of largely small, weak or voluntary initiatives, like Change4Life, we have seen little improvement in the nation's diet.

"Where the Government has introduced tough rules, such as improving school food, genuine progress has been made, but unless we really challenge our 'obesogenic' culture by doing things like introducing proper protections from junk-food marketing, these worrying trends will continue."

'Spank me, nanny! Spank me harder, it's for my own good!'

And he's preaching to a lot of converted. Like this charming indivisdual:

artgenie wrote: The solution is simple, but would the authorities do it? Foods containing dangerous ingredients of salts, sugars, fats etc. would be just outlawed from store shelves or food outlets. Just as foods containing drugs are presently not allowed to be sold. Get it???? I doubt it.

Now, it might be sarcasm (what food doesn't contain 'dangerous ingredients of salts, sugars and fats', after all?) but if so, isn't it depressing that you can no longer tell..?