Cereal Killer

I had Frosties for breakfast today. I haven’t actually eaten cereal in years, ever since I read a great article about it (which I have managed to dig up here). The article tells the history of processed breakfast cereals right back to the nineteenth century in the corn belt of the Mid-west of America. In the article it goes on about how what was once a great idea, became gradually a bad idea (for consumers) and basically a wonderful marketing phenomena (which was good for shareholders and company executives). It was a presidential nutritional advisor that actually made the argument that breakfast cereals should be treated the same as sugar and alcohol, due to the empty calories that all three foodstuffs offered. Now, I am loathe to befuddle correlation with causation, but the two most obese countries in the world are COINCIDENTALLY the two countries where sugary cereal sales are the highest. There are bound to be other factors, natch.

What it boils down to is that fact that some damn fine advertising guys have been on the case for decades. I ate cereal when I was a kid. Everyone did. They probably still do. Why? Because parents bought them as they were hoodwinked into believing that all cereals were healthy. Why would the colourful cereal boxes lie? Well, they don’t exactly lie, but the fact that the cereal companies fought tooth and nail to prevent a traffic light system on their boxes is highly informative. Portion size, daily amounts, the difference between type of milk that should be used all muddy the water and prevent first time analysis in the supermarket aisle. Also, kids screamed for cereal. All the TV adverts showed wonderfully inventive cartoon characters doing funny things. They don’t so much now, but when I was a kid there used to be toys in the boxes too. Or coupons to collect where you sent them off with a few stamps and you would get a Tony the Tiger bike sticker set after a month!

So anyway, I had some Frosties this morning. My normal bowl, which I use for normal stuff, has a capacity for 2.5 times the recommended daily allowance of 30g of Frosties. So I filled it up. With milk. And the calories contained were more than a bacon sandwich which I thought I wanted more but naturally declined as I thought it would be more calorific. Now, I am not saying that all cereals are created the same, but even things like all bran are damn high in salt, and special K is damn high in sugar. Ironically, all of the vitamins that they say are contained all occur naturally in corn and wheat, but the process of creating the cereal strips them out so they have to be artificially added back in.

 I don’t think I will be feeding my son sugary cereal when he is old enough.

Edit: shit, I gave him some sugary muesli for breakfast this morning. Oh well, if it was good enough for me... 

Food Stamps y'all

I came across an interesting article today about how legislators in South Carolina are proposing to treat benefits payments. They basically want to restrict food stamps to only be able to buy healthy food. For those of you that are not aware, in the US, food stamps are how the most common form of benefits are distributed. They are coupons with a monetary value which most supermarkets accept and they are currently restricted so you can buy all food and drink but not cigarettes or booze.

In the UK, the BBC had a poll last year where they asked people about this idea as with the soon to be introduced Universal Credit could be used to bring something like this about using a prepaid credit card. Generally, according to the poll, the majority of the people favoured some sort of restriction on what benefits could be used on.

So the case in point with food stamp restriction. I think it is a great idea. Three quarters of society in the US (and two thirds in the UK) are obese. Obesity is more prevalent in lower income families. Billions of dollars are being spent on trying to make people eat more healthily and billions more on dealing with the effects of obesity. Obviously there need to be safeguards over what constitutes “healthy” food but I think it could work. Some frozen and canned food would be acceptable, as only fresh food means more trips to the supermarket meaning more in petrol or public transport costs and time. The only issue is that all the big purveyors of crappy highly processed food will lobby the hell out of not carrying it through. Guess why? Fast food companies can accept food stamps! 

The End of the Frozen Food Revolution

Although I am on a diet, I had a great big dirty Chinese takeaway last night. It was glorious. I really really like Chinese food, however I am under no illusion as to the general quality of your average takeaway. I go to one fairly close to my house and the food has always been good and I have never been ill, however when I was making my selection at home with the menu before I popped out to collect it, it found myself shying away from the beef and lamb dishes. I love beef in Chinese dishes. Literally, all of them. But you have to ask yourself the question, where do they get their beef from? If Waitrose have been hornswoggled over having pork in their beef meatballs then what chance does the local Chinese takeaway that buys in bulk from grotty wholesalers have?

Then that got me thinking. What about the frozen pizza in the freezer. The one with ‘spicy beef’ on it? Now, without using a DNA sequencer myself, how am I to know that the food isn’t tainted?  All these thoughts swirled around my mind as I picked up my Chinese chicken curry, egg fried rice, vegetable spring rolls, and crispy fried chicken with Peking sauce. Nothing can be relied upon now, well, at least, in my own mind it can’t be. This horsemeat scandal will change the supermarket dynamics completely as the cheap frozen meals that people buy will no longer be supplied under a ‘ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies’ type of deal. The questions have been asked and the lies have been told. This means that frozen food prices will skyrocket to take into consideration of the ‘extra’ (which should have been in place anyway) due diligence that the supermarkets and end processors will have to take. If this is the case, then no one will buy them, as the people who rely on them won’t buy them as they won’t be able to afford it, and the people that don’t buy them anyway – well nothing will change there as well. So will it bring about the end of the frozen food revolution which started in the 70s until now? I hope so. 

An Everest a Week

“...It's like climbing an Everest a week, then if you get to the top, there is a bigger Everest you need to ascend. To get down from the climb is easy. There is a fun water slide with food to take and munch as you go. If you stay on the ascent then you can't even see the furthest Everest, but you know it's there. And after that last Everest is not another mountain, but a very thin plateau. That's the path you need to take for the rest of your life. But there are fun fireman's poles to get down from there all the way along it...”

I am on a diet.

I have written that sentence in my head a hundred times in the last 10 years. Then I deleted it. Or ignored it. Or just gorged myself on a Taco Bell. I think I am doing better this time. At least, it doesn’t feel like so much of a diet. My best diet was when I was 25 and I lost lots of weight by basically going to the gym everyday and exercising until I felt sick and didn’t even want to look at food. Turns out it wasn’t that sustainable. I have been on my current diet for over two months now but the time has flown and I still have lost a lot of weight. Still, time will tell.

I use an app to count my calories. It is quite handy but not too accurate about homemade stuff or some other things. The one thing that has been really hammered home to me is how so many products are extremely high in calories. Most people know that Domino's has got high calories, but almost 300 calories per slice? I never really thought about it before when I polished off a whole large pizza (ten slices) over 24 hours or even in one night (!).  Plus dips and starters, it is literally a weekly diet killer. Alcohol too, I discovered, is highly calorific. I went on diets before, went to the gym, ate carefully, but had beer and wine, and maybe a pizza once a week too, and wondered why I was only losing a few hundred grams a week or even nothing at all. Turns out I was just eating up to around my maintenance limit. Well, tracking my calories has cured me of that.

But I can see how easily that approximately 60% of adults in the UK are obese. It’s maths, biology, chemistry and physics. More energy is being consumed than being used. Those poor bastards on programs like “Half Tonne Teen” didn’t become like that overnight and they certainly didn’t want to end up like that. Just a few hundred extra calories a day and it all adds up over the years. I think we have a severe societal issue which could become even more absolutely massive in a few short years. It is already stretching the NHS to its limit.

Problem is, well, we know what the problem is. However the solution is not easy. You walk into any supermarket and all the high calorie products are on 2 for 1 whilst the vegetables sit there unsung and lamented. A double cheeseburger from McDonalds is cheaper than a stew pack of vegetables. So what can we do? It could be as simple as just supplying effective information. Basic education. But as far as I know, we as a society already do that. People sleepwalk into obesity and it is very difficult to return to normal.