Food for thought

[davywavy]

After the Miami Vice film came out a few years ago, I bought myself the first series of the '80's original on DVD. I remembered loving it when I was younger; the impossibly glamourous lifestyles of Vice cops and their prey in the high-living world of 1980's excess were the unattainable height of cool back then. Watched now, it's intersting to note how much things have changed, especially with lifestyles and expectations - what was then the lifestyle aspired to by rich drug barons and pimps now seems quite a prosiac middle-class life. Luxury in 1984 involved an open top car like an MR2, a television in every room, and a fridge full of food. In fact, so much have our expectations of life changed in the last 30 years that some aspects of wealthy 80s life are unrecognisable to us now; one scene I remember watching featured a corrupt lawyer working at his garden table with what looked like an overly large and clunky laptop, and it took several minutes for me to realise that laptops hadn't been invented in 1984, and the object actually was a briefcase propped open in front of him. What I expect to see in certain contexts is now so powerful that my subconscious no longer even recognises a briefcase unless I actively think about it.

As for Miami Vice itself, it holds up fairly well, perhaps because the depictions of what was wealth in the 1980s are still recognisable to us as a lifestyle now. The scripting, which was at the time seen as hard and gritty, is fairly run-of-the-mill with shock episodes like the one where a female cop goes undercover as a prostitute and has to sleep with a criminal, or another where a villain gets murdered in cold blood no longer getting the reaction they might have had thirty years ago. It's difficult to get all worked up about them in the wake of shows like The Wire, but that doesn't make the unwatchable.
However, there was one part of the shows which it took me a while to understand, and that was one of the casting decisions. It's an ensemble show, and much of the regular casting is understandable - you've got the tough but fair police chief, the lead duo of wisecracking southern lover and street-smart tough guy (Crockatt and tubbs themselves), the impossibly beautiful lady cop who goes undercover as girlfriend/lover a lot, the wiry and tough but less beautiful other female cop who doesn't get to go undercover as much but has got it where it counts, the geeky tech guy, the snitch, and so on. However, there's one cop who appeared to serve no useful purpose. Just some bloke with a beard, he seems to wander round the department talking crap and getting stuff wrong. I couldn't understand what the heck he was there for until, about six or seven episodes in, I finally got it. You see, like the laptop/briefcase moment, my brain has so shifted its expectations from the 1980s to now that I couldn't see what he was until I really thought about it: he was the comedy fat guy.

Something I'd kinda thought about whilst watching the series was how thin everyone looked: to modern eyes they were skinny, wiry, almost. But then they were lean and possibly even muscular and, in comparison to them a man carrying even a tiny amount of extra weight could be cast in the role of entertaining wobblebottom and everyone would have known that without it having to be spelled out. To me, that's a major shift in society; that in the space of thirty years the role of someone cast to be immediately noticably overweight has gone from this:



To this:



That's a heck of a difference right there. I'd guesstimate there's 100-150 pounds in difference between Miami Vice and Lost and, given that a pound of human fat contains 5,000 calories and a grown man is advised to eat about 2,500 calories a day, I'd rather be shipwrecked on a desert island with Hurley than Stan Switek because if I knocked Hurley on the head his calorific content would keep me going for the best part of an entire year longer.

It's pretty clear why this has happened: the price of food calories have dropped remarkably since 1984. By way of example, in real terms, McDonalds prices have dropped 17% in thirty years whilst spending power has increased by an average of over 75% in the same period. Food staple costs have dropped even more: on average the cost per calorie of pasta and rice have more than halved in real terms in the last thirty years; recent increases due to the shift in land use for biofuels and increased population haven't come even close to offsetting this. As a result, recent reports indicate that 30% of the UK population is classed as obese, and even though BMI is a rubbish reporting mechanism it doesn't mean there's nothing in that figure.

Anyway, on the front page of the paper I picked up last night was a report that Health Secretary Andrew Lansley had suggested that people could do something to tackle the obesity epidemic by eating less. I never thought I'd live to see the day when suggesting that people could lose weight by eating less food would be front-page news, but there you go. What's even more surprising is that organisations with names like the League of the Adipose, Rotund and Dumpy have actually criticised him for suggesting that the cost to the NHS for treating obesity-related ailments might be reduced a tad by people eating less, branding his comments as 'unhelpful' and suggesting that more, not less should be spent by the NHS on things like gastric band operations.

Funny old world, eh?

Comments

[davedevil.livejournal.com]

No excuse but it is easy to fall down that slope. For most people it is more eating badly rather the eating the wrong food. While I've been away recently I've been at a few restaurants which have the calorie count for the meals on the restaurants. It has made a huge difference to what and how I eat (that plus switching to low GI as much as I can).

I honestly don't understand why the government does not force the traffic light system onto everything and put it by pack size not by 80g of a 500g ready meal size...

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Because warnings are of little value when there are no consequences to failure to abide by them. Find me a person who doesn't know that Mars Bars aren't exactly good for them or McDonalds don't make the healthiest food in the world. Everyone already knows, but nobody changes their behavioural patterns because - as the representative of LARD quoted above said - the NHS is there to pick up the cost of failure to abide by warnings.

Introduce warnings with consequences - such as "If you eat this crap you can pay your own medical bills", and then there might be some point in introducing your system. Until then it would simply be legislation for the sake of legislation, and your lot have just inflicted a decade of that on us to no appreciable value.

[davedevil.livejournal.com]

I think many, probably most, people do not recognise the calorie count of the food they eat. For instance out at a Harvester recently which had the full range of 8oz steaks. The calorie difference between a fillet and a ribeye was astounding. about 500 for the fillet nearly 1100 for the rib eye.

I agree that obesity is a serious issue, I'm trying to recover from it myself. Providing support and structure in the same way you would to give up smoking would be a major step forward IMO.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I think many, probably most, people do not recognise the calorie count of the food they eat because there are no consequences to failing to do so. For as long as the consequences are minimised, we won't see the problem go away.

[nicnac.livejournal.com]

Blimey, I certainly didn't realise there was such a difference and am now mildly regretting the choice of rib eye in the US last month.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

More fat in ribeye than fillet would be my guess.

[nicnac.livejournal.com]

But that's a staggering difference, though, assuming the steaks are of a similar size.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Possibly the ribeye came with sauce and the fillet didn't?

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

In Harvester the sauces tend to come separately and have their own calories count, which is both awesome and scary as you realize how much fat is hidden there.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I remember when McDonalds pretended to become healthy in the wake of Supersize Me by introducing salads, and everyone was surprised when they found out that a McD's salad and dressing had more calories & salt than a Big Mac meal.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Oh my god, yes. I am always amused by the fact that Subway gives all the calorie count for their sandwiches without dressing. This does make them look awesomely healthy and no mistake!

[davedevil.livejournal.com]

Its the fat, it was quite astounding watching the calories creep up from the filet to the ribeye

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Randomly, I agree. I mean, I try and be vaguely aware of the calorie count in food, and am constantly surprised at how often it varies from my previous assumptions.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I think what people don't realize tho, is that the sandwich from Tesco that you have for your lunch could be anything between 200 and 700 calories and that makes a big difference. And when you do that all the time, it adds up.

For example, I regularly have sushi and chocolate for my lunch. I pick sushi because it is tasty and filling but low in calories and I pick one of the chocolate bars which are about 110 calories. I eat a lovely lunch for 400 calories as a result. If I was paying a little less attention and grabbed something else from the lunch food section in Tesco - say a nice smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwich (which is fish and carbohydrate, so sort of the same) and maybe a mars bar (which is still chocolate) and suddenly the calorie content of my lunch has doubled.

I don't think people get fat from saying 'sod it - I'll have MacDonalds today and every day!'. I think they get fat from not really understanding that changing rice for bread and cream cheese, and picking one chocolate bar over another makes a big change. I think education is the way forward.

I do agree, as a note, that real consequences do change whether people do look after themselves. I currently am 2 stone overweight, I think. I know I am. I also know that when a doctor told me to lose 2 stone for an operation, I did so without any pause or hesitation. Unfortunately, it appears that the nebulous prospect of looking a bit prettier is not enough to motivate me to stop eating cake. However, I also think universal healthcare is important, not just universal health care for the well educated and people who can afford gym membership.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Universal healthcare, like universal anything, eventually runs into the problem of finite resources and how best those things can be allocated. if there isn't a push to make the treatment of self-inflicted illnesses - like those related to being porky or smoking - at least partially self-funded by the patient within the next ten years I'll be very surprised indeed.
We're skint and we're going to be getting skinter for at least another three years, and people who don't step up and take responsibility for things like their own health are going to have plenty to complain about (and find not a lot of sympathy in return) for some time to come.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I think the issue is there that the people who will suffer the most from such things are likely to be the most vulnerable in society. I am not saying it is not possible to eat healthily when poor. I am saying it is a lot easier to eat healthily when well off.

I also think that there are very few of us who won't, eventually, find ourselves screwed by a 'self inflicted' cause. I mean, are you saying that because I smoked for two years when I was a teenager, I shouldn't get free health care if I develop lung cancer now?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Two things there, so: I'm not sure why the 'most vulnerable' would be any more impacted by said changes than anyone else - they're surely just as capable of quitting smoking and eating less as anyone, for example.
As you're aware, I live as if on the dole for two months every year as a personal discipline, and during that time I tend to eat a great deal better because takeaway food is surprisingly pricey and so I can't afford to eat crap.

As for your other question, I'm not advocating the introduction of a grandfather clause in any legislation. The only time grandfathering legislation has ever been done in this country was by the Labour party, and as you know I'm not a big fan of their methods.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I'm going to break my reply up into two parts.

First of all, as regards my second point...

OK. So. You become godking of the UK and bring in this law. I am not affected as you're not grandfathering this law. However, does this mean that any teenager who tries out a few crafty cigarettes behind the bike sheds is henceforth banned from free treatment for any lung conditions? If so, how the hell do doctors make that call? How do they prove who has smoked and who hasn't? If not, what about the person who smokes for twenty years, then quits? How about five years? Or ten years? It would be a nightmare to administer and would also do horrible things to doctor/patient confidentiality. How can it be a good thing if you've got a system where patients are actively encouraged to lie to their doctors in order to be able to access treatment?

I understand the idea of telling patients that in order to receive treatment they need to stop smoking, but I think that is a very different thing. I also suspect that there may be other different but related problems to telling people that they can't have medical help if they are overweight. I mean, how quickly do women need to lose weight post-baby, for example, in order to be entitled to medical care? What about people with other disabilities which make it impossible to exercise? Are they allowed to carry extra weight or do they just need to diet more rigorously? Is a side effect of a spinal injury now going to be that you have to stop eating half the food you like, just to ensure your medical treatment is able to continue?

It feels like a huge can of worms to me.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Well, should I become godking of the Uk I wouldn't introduce such a law; if I got put in charge I'd scrap the NHS as it and replace it with something that actually worked well, like the Frech of the Singaporean systems (the two best healthcare systems int eh world by outcomes, btw). However, the Uk is limited by the way it is more important to the Guardian and unions that the NHS remains a bastion of ideological purity rather than something which gives good healthcare, which is why I don't have much to do with it.

So as it is, I'm interested in what will happen rather than what I think shuld happen. the world has made it clear to me that it doesn't care what i think, so I've adapted to predicting what is going to happen rather than trying to force it into my views.

As such: what I'm saying is that I reckon self-inflicted illnesses like obesity and smoking are going to be penalised in the future. They're easy targets for savings, the general population is going to be broadly in support of them, so it's not s difficult argument for a government to win. The NHS in its current form is unaffordable and changing it to something which is affordable is political suicide so we can see tinkering around the edges and finding savings where possible is going to be the future.

What will happen is that the obese, smokers and the like will be told that unless they change their lifesyle they simply won't get treatment, or a reduced treatment. Rather than tell someone who had a sneaky fag as a teenager that they can't be treated, people who smoke now will be told they have to quit before they're treated, and if they start smoking again they can whistle for getting treatment in future. Fat people will be told they have to lose weight before they get treated, and if they put the weight back on and weight-related illnesses reoccur they can whistle for it in future.

I'm fairly confident something like that will happen within the next few decades.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Actually, you're probably right. It probably will.

Randomly, I kind of thought it already have. I know I had to lose two stone before I could have an op a while back because I was told that otherwise I'd just develop complications post-surgery and waste everyone's time and money. Maybe that was just the surgeon who was seeing me, tho.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Next, the most vulnerable in society!

I know that you live on the dole for two months every year - it's something we've talked about before, and I think it's really interesting. One thing you've said about this before, and my periodic bouts of being poor due to my interesting job choices sort of backs this up, is that it isn't the day to day living which is really tough on the dole, but a lack of a cushion when things go wrong. So, I suspect that most people who are on benefits long term have slightly less money than you or I would if living on that for two months as they will be paying off debts incurred in bad times/struggling to save for Christmas etc.

I am also unsure if I agree with you re: those people not being impacted. I have found that in general I can either be on a 'saving money' kick or a 'eating very healthily and losing weight' kick. This is, I admit, partly due to lack of energy on my part, but the point remains that I think it is easier to eat healthily on a good income than on a poor one. Yes, take out is expensive. Equally, fresh fruit is more expensive than biscuits. Good quality meat is more expensive than pre-packaged crap. MacDonalds is one of the cheapest sources of food out there - it's cheaper to get a Happy Meal than it is to buy the ingredients for a chicken stir fry and you don't have to take the time over it, and a lot of people are time poor - a single mum, working full time and trying to look after 3 kids, for example, may well be pretty tired and the prospect of doing inventive things with fresh veg and brown rice may well be something she will struggle with.

I don't know, of course, not having been a struggling single mum, but this is my vague feeling. I could be wrong.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Yup; I've said before that lifestyle has momentum. I do my dole-living in an environment which has a working cooker and fridge; if the boiler died during the experiment I'm aware my income would only allow me to make those £2-a-week HP deals which take 3 years to pay off and result in my eniding up paying twice what just buying a unit would cost. However, I disagree that a happy meal (especially a family's-worth of happy meals) is cheaper than a stirfry. In fact, I'm happy to bet you hard cash that it isn't.

The thing is, these problems are the result of previous actions; we've dropped home economics from the curriculum, meaning that we are raising generations to live on £65 a week without teaching them to cook or budget (shall I start about the education system again? I can, you know). We are importing unskilled labour whilst unemployment doesn't drop (Gordon Brown claimed, in 2006, that he had "created" 2.6m new jobs. However, the number of people unemployed and claiming benefits remained resolutely between 5-5.1m at the time).
In effect, we educate people badly so they can't get decent jobs, import unskilled labour so they can't get crap jobs, and then don't bother teaching them to live on a pittance whilst pursuing economic policies which mean we're never going to be able to afford more than a pittance.

This is, in a nutshell, why I have effectively disengaged from the political process.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

A happy meal is £1.99. I'm going to assume you are getting two of them - so, a mother and her kid. That is around £4.

I cooked a stir fry but the other night, for myself and Jeremiah. So, two people. I spent £1 on fresh noodles, £1.98 on diced quorn, £1 on a pack of mushrooms (of which I used half, so 50p), £1.65 on a pack of peppers (of which I used one, so, let's say 50p on that as well) and £1 on a jar of stir in sauce. In total, about £5.

The stir fry took me time to cook as well, and involved me wandering around Tesco in an irritable mood because I hate Tesco at 6 pm. Having said that, it was far far tastier than the Happy Meal would have been, was guilt free, and the cooking part of it was quite fun, and overall I feel the extra £1 was well spent, although I didn't get a small crappy plastic toy with my stir fry (and my life is the lesser for it). But I can see why someone who was tired, stressed and (as you say) hadn't been taught how to cook might find it easier to get crap.

*ponders*

You may be right about cooking meals for families, mind. I've never done that and so tend to think about the economics of food in terms of feeding one or two.

Honestly, I agree with you 100% about the lack of HE in schools. I tend to think that basic textiles (like sewing) and probably some kind of metalwork/craft skill also ought to be taught. More money sense in schools would be an awesome idea and I think you're dead right there.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Just as an observation, I think I see where you made your bloomer - buying for a single meal in tesco.

Buying in bulk from the market or a greengrocer is the way to go if you want proper food at decent prices (and dried noodles are way cheaper than fresh ones too).

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

I suspect the problem is what's regarded as "normal". Go out for a meal, "normal" is three courses and a drink or two, right? Or maybe five or six slices of pizza, plus salad-bar and icecream, and a Coke. A bit of battered fish so big it won't fit on the plate, rest of said plate covered a few inches deep in chips.
Low-cal, low-fat and salads are "abnormal", so you feel deprived if you choose them instead of what everyone else is eating. I've never tried adding up the calories in that "normal" meal, but my guess is that it probably contains my calorie allowance for a couple of days if I'm just trying to stay the same weight, not lose it.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Thing is, I wouldn't consider that normal at all. I did a test at my gym a while ago which told me that with my build and training regime I can eat up to about 3,200 calories a day and even with that I'd look at any of those meals you just described and consider tham waaaay too much. I couldn't eat that volume of food, really.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

But "normal" is how it's presented, I think you'd agree? I couldn't physically eat that much either, but I could easily get through a sufficiently significant percentage of "normal" that I'd blow my calorie allowance for a couple of days.

[twicedead.livejournal.com]

You train up to it. Having been on a diet for 4 months now, where I have eaten significantly smaller portions, I was faced with a meal I would have wolfed in seconds previously - I could barely touch the edges of it.

It's very easy to train yourself to consume more food.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I've found the same thing. I have also discovered that sweet food and greasy food makes me feel a little ill now, as I've cut back on the sugar and saturated fat content of my food significantly.

One interesting thing weight watchers does is it tries to train you to listen to your body more, and to learn to tell the difference between 'uncomfortably full' and 'content'. I think a lot of people don't feel full unless they feel absolutely stuffed and bloated.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I think it's not that everyone has got fatter. I think it is that we have gone to extremes. I mean, look at the female Gladiators in the original series, for example. The women were all in awesome physical condition, but they had muscle, toning, and in general were amazonian rather than skeletal. When the show was rebooted a few years ago, I don't think a single female gladiator topped 9 stone.

I do agree that fat has gotten fatter, but I also think skinny has gotten skinnier. And both are not terribly healthy!

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

if I knocked Hurley on the head his calorific content would keep me going for the best part of an entire year longer

Assuming you could combine generous portions of Hurley with indigenous fruit and vegetables, you'd still need, at the very least, a method of storing the Hurley so it would keep. This is kinda tricky, certainly more so than the fairly straightforward process of knocking him on the head, stabbing him in the neck, and then turning his skin inside out to get to the good stuff. I expect you'd have to dry these longish strips of Hurley in the sun to produce a sort of stringy comic-relief jerky.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

When I was composing this in my head at the gym last night, the problem of Hurley-storage did occur to me. I eventually came to the conclusion that my best bet would be to knock him on the head and keep him tied up but alive so I could just trim bits off him at need.

However, I decided that digression might undermine the serious tone of the post.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I like the elegance of this solution, but I think there's at least one complication: Not only would you have to spend medical supplies on keeping him alive despite the trauma and blood-loss inherent in getting meal-sized chunks of flesh carved off a person, I think you'd also have to feed him.

This makes point of the whole exercise a bit thermodynamically suspect: If your dominant source of sustenance is a steady supply of Hurley-based fat and protein, then you could easily end up feeding the fellow with his own body parts.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I'd worried about that as well, but frankly if I were in the frame of mind to carve bits of flesh from another person I doubt I'd be overly fussed about making them eat said bits themselves.

I also considered that were I on a desert island I could easily evaporate seawater to make a salt pan for preserving his corpse. Perhaps that's less morally iffy.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Well, I was thinking mostly in terms of the vast amounts of wasted energy inherent in the process of transforming extracted Hurley back into living Hurley. Then again, I've been theoretically trained with taxpayer money to know how to consume delicious, succulent ant hills in case there is ever a sufficiently desperate emergency. So I may be a touch biased.

[belak-krin.livejournal.com]

The bit I never understand is why the NHS (and policy in general) continues to operate on the basis of diet and excercise information instead of any form of psychological help.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't think that anyone believes that pie for breakfast is healthy, rather there are a lot of people that think 'fuck it, I want a pie for breakfast. It will be tasty and I will enjoy it'

Seems to me like a whole lot of cheap CBT style excercises on how to cope with that 'I really fancy a massive kebab right now' that comes from years of engrained bad habits might be more useful than telling people that fat is bad mmmkay?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

In counterpoint, I reckon we could reduce the size of the pie for breakfast eating population by pushing the message "Eat all the pies you want, but don't come waddling to the NHS when you get sick because it's your own look out, fatso. You want help? Show some responsibility."

The she-David works in a heart hospital, and often sees people with heart/lung problems puffing away on a fag in the car park - some of them still plumbed into the droip after having open heart surgery to fix up arteries clogged by too much smoking. You can probably guess my solution without me having to spell it out.

[belak-krin.livejournal.com]

That is one way of looking at it, but I just think that the current system of 'either you're fat enough for surgery or you just need to eat less' clearly isn't working.

We have entire departments devoted to eating disorders that result in skinny people, but over-eating is still seen as a simple issue of greed.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

And as an addition, this is a really interesting post with some really interesting discussion which is making me think, and I am appreciative of that.

[(Anonymous)]

'ere, us liflong fagsters have paid through the nose in ciggie tax so that when we start coughing our lungs up at 50 we will be given enough heroin to keep us quiet until we snuff it. I have no idea, 'cos I can't be bothered to be an accountant, but how much does it cost extra to keep you healthy types going for your 30 years of dementia?

More fun is whether we can eat the cabin boy/lardie who obviuosly can't make it, I refer you to the top criminal case of all time: R v Dudley & Stephens:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens

(the actual law report is far better; their lordships, even in the 1880s, are clearly agonising over it).

D