Obesity: a national security issue?

[IvanTheHorrible]

This video is from 2012, and things have not got better since then. This is a US General describing the impact of deteriorating health among young people on the performance of the armed forces, and he also touches on the human and economic cost of this epidemic:

youtube.com/watch?v=sWN13pK...(Not working as expected?)

His basic point is that while governments have undoubtedly made this worse with misguided policies, they now cannot or will not fix it. It's up to every individual to sort out their own lives and the lives of their children. It's only the usual TED-talk 15 minutes, so well worth watching.

[BridgeGirl Administrator SS Supercook 2 stone]

Thanks for posting this, I'll have a look later this morning

[13Valerie]

Fantastic and scary... The statistics are shocking.. thanks for sharing

[IndigoBlue61]

Very, very sobering read. 😢 Is history repeating itself? The NHS was the result of mal-nourished population being unfit to fight in the Boer War . . . Are we really heading that way again?

[IvanTheHorrible Maintainer in reply to IndigoBlue61]

Is that right? I never knew about that.

Incidentally, I hope that's not an indication of your age

The Brits have always been a bit of unhealthy lot; the only difference between the upper classes and the lower was the type of unhealthy food they enjoyed. Was it George Orwell who commented on the working classes subsisting on tea, white bread, and potatoes? Way before that, William Cobbett was ranting about tea-drinking and people who refused to cook proper meals or grow some vegetables. My mum occasionally reminisces about how dreadful food was when she was young (50s/early 60s). Meanwhile, the idle rich have always been ... idle, with effete dietary habits. It's quite a surprise we made it through two world wars.

Of course the video is talking about Americans, but it's not radically different in the UK. PE, as far as I know, isn't on the curriculum anymore, and the stats about games TV-watching are probably similar. What bothers me is this: the army fitness tests aren't particularly demanding. I'm heading for 50 and I can meet the US recruitment standards (although not the UK ones, which are tougher). It's not so much that we might need to fight a war one day - although there is that - but there are a lot of other jobs that demand a similar level of fitness, and a whole generation of kids won't be able to do them. Not every kid is academically inclined, or wants to settle into a desk job in front of a computer screen. Other options - which they might find interesting and fulfilling - are being deliberately taken away from them.

[IndigoBlue61 in reply to IvanTheHorrible]

Haha . . . No I wasnt around during the Boer War actually 🤣 but the NHS was partly the result of the lack of fit and healthy men to fight.

Maybe it takes something as equally startling before things change again

[BridgeGirl Administrator SS Supercook 2 stone]

Thanks for posting this. Very depressing, as we aren't far behind.

I was a child in your mum's era and though food was pretty uninspiring, with nothing like the variety we have on the shelves today, at least it was food. And we just ate food. At meals. Three times a day. Sitting at a table, with cutlery. (Sounding like a real dinosaur now, with apologies to your mum)

I've been puzzling about when 'snacking' became a 'thing', an expected part of everyday eating. I think that as a child a snack would be something you might have if your meal was delayed, not something you had as well as meals. And the idea of comestibles (not sure I should say food) being packaged as 'snacks' is bizarre to me. We have such a distorted relationship with food, and I'm not excluding myself, or I wouldn't be here.

[Hidden in reply to BridgeGirl]

As a little girl, I remember crisps "appearing", with the little bag of salt in the pack. I remember sweet treats and chocolate, but we didn't get them every day. A treat was a treat in the Olden Days !🤗

[BridgeGirl Administrator SS Supercook 2 stone in reply to Hidden]

Yes, by definition a 'treat' is something outside the ordinary.

[IndigoBlue61 in reply to BridgeGirl]

Interesting about snacks. When I began this journey and was planning how best to utilise my (newly restricted) calories, snacks were the first to go, I wasn’t going to compromise my meals by spending calories on snacks!! Then I read somewhere about healthy adults being able to go 5/6 hours between meals. So I agree, when did snacking become ‘normal’?

[Hidden in reply to IndigoBlue61]

At the risk of being somewhat cynical, I do believe that the Food Industry Advertisers "normalised" snacking. Decades ago !

[BridgeGirl Administrator SS Supercook 2 stone in reply to Hidden]

Yes, they turned it into a commodity, and now it's seen as normal

[IndigoBlue61 in reply to Hidden]

As a way of making extra profit!!! 😡