i_hate_beckham said:
The government for a while now have been telling us to eat 5 portions of fruit and veg a day, why though doesnt potatoes count as 1 of those 5 a day?
I'm inclined to take most of these government eating campaigns with a pinch of salt...only they're trying to get us to eat less of that, too, shh-boom.
But seriously. These campaigns are an attempt to get a message across to people who are often extremely ignorant about the most basic aspects of food and diet. If you say "potatoes are OK", then there'll be a lot of people who will promptly say "yay, I can eat chips 3 times a day!", and end up 10 years later, obese, and lying in the coronary care unit.
It's about a certain amount of common sense. The idea of the 5-a-day thing is to get people to eat more proper vegetables. That means a BALANCE of all kinds of things - salad leaves, green veg, root veg, the whole bit. Living on just lettuce, or just beetroot, or just beans would be about as stupid as living on just chips.
The bottom line here is that heart disease is now our biggest killer. Two of the biggest causative factors of heart disease are high cholesterol and high blood pressure, both of which are affected by diet. It's not black-and-white (I think this is where these "messages" get it wrong - they oversimplify the situation), but it's fairly safe to say that if you're eating a diet that's high in green veg, with moderate amounts of staples like potatoes and rice, and moderate amounts of proteins and fats, you'll be healthier as a result.
A lot of dietary "advice", too, is about marketing. Margarine manufacturers want to emphasise the difference between polyunsaturated and saturated fats, as if that's the only issue, when the real deal is that we need to watch our overall fat intake: worrying about which sort of fats you're eating when you're consuming 3/4 of your daily calorific intake AS fats is like worrying about whether the Titanic went down bow-first or stern-first. Similarly, the fibre thing - it's far better to adapt one's diet to ensure that there's lots of good high-fibre food going in than it is to start faffing about with bread-with-hidden-fibre, although I'll admit that even that is better than no fibre at all.
And the corresponding part of the message, which often gets left aside while everyone goes on about chips and saturated fat, is that the diet is only part of the story: exercise is the other bit. You CAN get to a healthier weight by diet alone, but it's fucking hard if you're not taking any exercise; similarly, you CAN eat like a horse and do fuckloads of exercise, but it's bloody hard to lose much weight or get healthy doing it that way.
At least there's some scope for the concept of "balance" in the 5-a-day campaign, which makes it a bit better than many of the others, but there's also a slight element of the paternalistic "do as we tell you" about it, which still doesn't solve the problem of people just not thinking about what they're eating.
The salt thing, for my money, is probably one of the more important ones. The amount of salt in prepared food is staggering, and we have, as a society, become inured to very high levels of salt in food - you could almost say we're "addicted" to them, because food with less salt in can taste strangely "flat", but salt is a very significant contributor to high blood pressure, and well worth while cutting down on.
