Scaring you thin

Babies need to eat a lot because they grow fast at first. Some get a little fat, most lose that at puberty when the really fast growth starts. Some stay fat. People are not all the same.

Childhood obesity is a big buzz at the moment. The town I work in has a huge school that covers most of the small villages around it as well as the town itself. When they come out at lunchtime it’s a veritable infestation of children. It’s like someone kicked over a nest of them.

There are very few fat ones. Very few. I don’t recall seeing a single one I would call ‘obese’ but the Righteous set the obesity bar so low these days they’re soon going to need a new term for those who genuinely are obese. ‘Ah, you are beyond obese. You are CyrilSmith’.

So supermarkets get nagged about sweets at checkouts when really parents should be nagged into controlling their feral brats and saying ‘no’ and meaning it. Food manufacturers get nagged about sugar and fat content of foods that taste of nothing without sugar and fat – and salt. None of it works. Kids still eat what they like.

A lot of them smoke and drink too, egged on by the antismokers and antidrinkers who make sure smoking and drinking are at the forefront of the daily news.

What’s left to try? Telling kids things are bad for them seems to make them want more. How about scaring the parents into keeping babies thin? Rather than going to manufacturers and getting them to fix the problem while quietly recalling the affected products, let’s blow it to the newsfeed. Even though the whole thing is riddled with uncertainties and ‘needs more research’, put out the scare story now. Thin babies are bound to result and I’m sure there will be no stunted growth or deaths as an unintended consequence.

There is also a major desire among the Righteous to make us all Vegan. No meat – they are starting with red meat and will move on to chicken and fish after they’ve done that.

Bacon is one they’ve been concentrating on lately. Carcinogenic, pumped full of water and salt, generally bad for you… but it’s bacon! It’s an essential nutrient. A lack of bacon causes people to become unreasonable and violent. ISIS is all the proof you need.

Hey, if they can use correlation = causation, we can do it too.

Bacon, ham, etc. is full of water because the regulator set a maximum limit to how much water can be pumped into meats to bulk them up. Manufacturers, obviously, always take it to the maximum allowed. Selling water as meat. An unintended consequence, perhaps?

Now we are told that Irish bacon has lots of salt in it. Duh. It’s a cured meat. Of course it has salt in it! More than the guidelines, apparently, but we all know by now that most guidelines are made up numbers. The research cannot differentiate between added salt and salt that was already there before the recommended amount was added, and I bet the butchers didn’t have to measure the total after processing. Just a thought.

The WHO recommends we should all have less than 5g of salt per day. I have never attempted to measure my salt intake, nor have I ever counted calories. I eat pizza, hot dogs, burgers, ready meals, things I cook myself that get salt added to them (and chillies). I use olive oil a lot. It costs more than the canola or sunflower oils but it has antibacterial properties.

If I feel like fish and chips, I go to the chip shop. We now have a pizza shop again that covers much more than pizza, and we have a really good curry shop too.

My fruit and veg intake is way below recommendations and I haven’t been inside a gym since school. I have been quizzed by staff at work as to how I can be this shape when ignoring every health rule ever devised. I think it might be because I ignore all those rules.

Anyway, I digress.

The WHO recommendation is less than 5g of salt a day. For everyone. No matter your size or shape or whether you have a job where you sweat a lot (and lose a lot of salt) or have a job where you don’t sweat at all. We are not clones. Some need to take in more salt than others.

The average intake for Irish adults is 7.4g per day. Tsk. Naughty Irish. But they are equipped with kidneys that, in normal use, are quite capable of excreting that small excess… if they need to. In physical jobs most of the excess will come out with sweat.

That’s if it is an excess. Are the Irish all keeling over with salt poisoning? I’m sure the Daily Mail would have grabbed the story if they were. The WHO recommendation isn’t based on reality. None of the modern recommendations seem to have any link to reality. They are based on a Standard Human. An average person who doesn’t exist.

(An aside – Pure coincidence, but my mother sent a parcel today containing several things, one of which was a chocolate leprechaun showing his arse. The other things were even more random)

We are to be scared of salt. The word ‘Hyponatremia’ really needs to be more widely disseminated among the population.

At the end of that article, it states that meat is the biggest source of high quality protein and vitamin D in the Irish diet BUT also the biggest source of fat and energy. They don’t want us to have any energy?

Over in Denmark, land of the failed fat tax, they are now trying to scare people with ‘The Environment’. They want a tax on food to make it even more expensive because that will reduce the amount the Danes eat – especially meat – and that will save the planet.

I’ve been there. Meat, especially pork and bacon, are really big and popular among the people. Take them away and you’ll have Viking raids on the Netherlands for Dutch bacon.

They already take trips across the border to Germany to stock up on lots of things that are cheaper there. All they will do is add bacon to their shopping list. It won’t work and it would have no effect on the planet if it did.

I’ve been to China too. Pig farming is huge there. They love pork and they eat every bit of every pig. Including a few bits you don’t want to know about. The amount of red meat consumed in China makes Denmark’s annual consumption look like lunch. Denmark punishing its people in the name of saving the planet is utterly pointless and based entirely on spite.

They want to scare you into becoming a vegan. There have been a few days out of the last 56 years when I didn’t eat any meat but discounting the ones at the start that were almost all milk, they were few indeed. There were times I didn’t have any meat – a few times I didn’t have anything at all – but it didn’t kill me. It doesn’t seem to have done me any harm at all.

When meat is a thing of the past, what will we eat in the future? Vegetables?

See, the thing about that is, you are reliant on every year being a good growing year and you have a limited space to grow vegetables anyway. Places that are grass for cows and sheep aren’t grass to feed cows and sheep. They are grass because nothing else grows there. No sensible farmer is going to grass over land that could be growing a profitable vegetable crop. They put the cows and sheep onto land where bugger all other than grass will grow.

A totally vegetable based diet cannot feed all the people alive today. The Greens will tell you it can but the Greens want a huge reduction in the human population. Trust them? Up to you.

I’m sticking with bacon. I might add a bit of salt next time.