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Obesity crisis in Ireland Mod Note post 1

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  • Registered Users Posts: 7,938 ✭✭✭joeguevara


    calorie rich foods taste better

    But you can eat this as long as you do it in a balanced way. Or exercise to mean that you are calorie deficit. It is not one or the other.


  • Registered Users Posts: 30,024 ✭✭✭✭freshpopcorn


    ceadaoin. wrote: »
    I think they still teach kids the food pyramid which is totally wrong.

    I've seen a revised food pyramid being done.
    Fruit and Vegtables are now at the bottom, then there's whole meal items above that.
    It wasn't the traditional one.


  • Registered Users Posts: 12,032 ✭✭✭✭Richard Hillman


    There is no crisis. Vested interests need to come out with more extreme "Report's" and "Studies" to seem relevant.

    Anyway, who wants to be a 5k run a day person, when all that will happen is that you'll end up in a nursing home in your 80s, unable to remember your children's name and having somebody wipe your bum for you.

    Enjoy your lives.


  • Registered Users Posts: 4,522 ✭✭✭worded


    We have to say a big fat no to McDonalds


  • Registered Users Posts: 19,802 ✭✭✭✭suicide_circus


    everything is a crisis


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  • Closed Accounts Posts: 8,474 ✭✭✭Obvious Desperate Breakfasts


    joeguevara wrote: »
    I think lack of knowledge on nutrition is a major factor. My father was trying to lose weight and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t. I went through his diet and he was shocked when his supposedly health breakfast of granola, yoghurt and fruit was coming in at 700 calories. He was drinking fruit juice and didn’t realize the calorie content. Also he thought fat was bad because it was drilled into him but ate carbs excessively.

    Education on balanced diet should be in primary school.

    It is drilled into the skulls of people born in the 1950s that fat = bad. My parents use those crappy spreads instead of butter. They don’t get that it’s the amount of butter you eat that can cause problems, not the actual product itself. And my father thinks that potatoes have hardly any calories. So he eats a mound of them for dinner. But putting any real butter on them is verboten. Personally I’d prefer less spud and more butter.

    He has actually lost two stone in the last year on the advice of his GP but I fear it won’t last because he’s too afraid of fats and too afraid to eat less spuds. He hasn’t really changed his habits and is terrified of having sweet things in the house. Food still has a hold over him.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 2,194 ✭✭✭Zorya


    It starts very young. It's gruesome to see the amount of sweets very small children eat. That has to completely mess up their metabolic systems. Yet they are often doled out as pacifiers. At Easter now the smallest child will have a sea of chocolate. Their poor bodies. And then they get ADHD diagnoses and people wonder why. I didn't allow mine to have any sweets until they were about four. I know, what a grinch! Of course I had people saying I was cruel, grannies and grandads saying they wanted to give them a treat. Funny that the word spoil has different meanings. But their palates were trained to love ordinary food. Sugar destroys a child's palate, maybe for life. It's crack cocaine for kids.


  • Registered Users Posts: 23,460 ✭✭✭✭One eyed Jack


    GAA Beo wrote: »
    What can be done about the obesity crisis in Ireland


    There’s as much an “obesity crisis” as there is a “housing crisis”, and all sorts of other crises, “epidemics”, etc. The only thing that’s actually on the increase are the inflated figures based upon shifting standards over time.

    The first thing you could do of course is get some perspective -

    Bodywhys - Statistics


    At the same time as there are a minority of people in Irish society who are overweight, there are a minority of people in Irish society who are underweight, and it’s not an issue that will be solved with silly “State interventions” and all the rest of it. It doesn’t matter what children are taught in school when they are constantly exposed to imagery in the media which purports that they have to look a certain way, regardless of any consequences for their health or other factors which aren’t taken into consideration in an image conscious society.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 8,474 ✭✭✭Obvious Desperate Breakfasts


    Zorya wrote: »
    It starts very young. It's gruesome to see the amount of sweets very small children eat. That has to completely mess up their metabolic systems. Yet they are often doled out as pacifiers. At Easter now the smallest child will have a sea of chocolate. Their poor bodies. And then they get ADHD diagnoses and people wonder why. I didn't allow mine to have any sweets until they were about four. I know, what a grinch! Of course I had people saying I was cruel, grannies and grandads saying they wanted to give them a treat. Funny that the word spoil has different meanings. But their palates were trained to love ordinary food. Sugar destroys a child's palate, maybe for life. It's crack cocaine for kids.

    I know, I’m a bit shocked at how many Easter eggs childers get these day. Like, when I was a kid, the odd child got a pile of chocolate eggs but most of us just got one or two. Max three. Parents and maybe grandparents type thing.

    In fairness, my bro-in-law is very good at rationing the Easter eggs that his children receive. They probably don’t even eat all of what they receive.


  • Registered Users Posts: 30,024 ✭✭✭✭freshpopcorn


    I know, I’m a bit shocked at how many Easter eggs childers get these day. Like, when I was a kid, the odd child got a pile of chocolate eggs but most of us just got one or two. Max three. Parents and maybe grandparents type thing.

    In fairness, my bro-in-law is very good at rationing the Easter eggs that his children receive. They probably don’t even eat all of what they receive.

    Now I'm not making excuses.
    When I was a kid. If you got a Mars Medium Easter egg off a relative it was fairly good.
    The egg was a generous size and you got two bars prices were three for €9/€10.
    Now however the Mars medium size egg is smaller and you get two little bars. So, people tend to give three eggs that cost €4.50.


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  • Closed Accounts Posts: 2,194 ✭✭✭Zorya


    Now I'm not making excuses.
    When I was a kid. If you got a Mars Medium Easter egg off a relative it was fairly good.
    The egg was a generous size and you got two bars prices were three for €9/€10.
    Now however the Mars medium size egg is smaller and you get two little bars. So, people tend to give three eggs that cost €4.50.

    Kids can end up with 10 or more easter eggs, and then set about eating them on the one day - the insulin spike must be like a shock in their bodies. The chocolate is cheap oul sh!te too, I have seen small kids mindlessly drooling it they have had so much. Anyways I don't want to labour the point, but it kind of freaks me out. Not that I don't like treats - I really do - though I prefer to bake them. I worked in my youth in a biscuit factory in the UK and the ****e that goes into biscuits would turn your stomach. The fat they use is gross. Butter is much better. Anyways I'll stop - I must be triggered :D
    * runs away from keyboard!


  • Registered Users Posts: 7,158 ✭✭✭facehugger99


    I think these new-fad diets are mental.

    I work with a guy who fasts on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

    He literally doesn't eat anything for 48 hours. He was telling us this in the canteen a couple of weeks back, said he's lost a couple of stone.

    He looked really terrible last Thursday in work - not well looking at all.

    Is this a new thing - fasting?

    Just eat more sensibly in moderation, no need to be staring yourself for 2 days.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 608 ✭✭✭Dalomanakora


    Fasting is okay if you're doing it safely and have a significant amount of weight to lose. If he looks terrible while fasting, he's probably not having electrolytes and magnesium supplements, which he should be having.




  • rgodard80a wrote: »
    Encourage people to drink more water.

    The bottled water industry appear to have done pretty well at pushing that agenda by misinterpreting and misquoting one or two studies on the subject.

    We seem to drink _more_ than enough water at this stage. And the bottled water industry seem to have managed to install this fallacious "8 Glasses of water a day" myth in our heads.

    They have managed to do this based off 2 studies mainly.

    One they used to claim we need to drink that much water a day - but that is not actually what the "food and nutrition board" recommendation from 1945 in question says. They are simply misquoting it. And people have been ever since.

    The other was from 2009-2012 and claims our children are dehydrated all the time - but the study used a ridiculously low bar for "dehydrated" and by a measure method that no one clinically actually uses (urine osmolality).

    Two studies since that one then used the same standard and was, as you might have guessed, a study commissioned and paid for by bottled water manufacturers. The Nestle Water company or their subsidiaries in this case. And it too - because of the ridiculous standards used - concluded that 2/3 of children in France and Los Angeles were dehydrated all the time.

    So no - I would be sceptical about pushing a "drink more water" idea, or what it would actually achieve. Even though people like Michelle Obama were pushing things like the "Drink Up Campaign" to get people drinking more of it.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 12,449 ✭✭✭✭pwurple


    Change to a 4 day working week.

    Office workers are expected to do two or three jobs... Their paid work, look after their homes and families, and also exercise and keep healthy. The third gets dropped because there aren't enough free hours to get it all done.

    Why the feck, in this age of automation, are we all working such ridiculous hours behind desks.

    We should be on 10 hour weeks at this stage.




  • Take diet there is so much information out there now about what is healthy/unhealthy. It's not rocket science.

    Sure I agree but there is two problems I see there.

    1) The first is there is _too much_ information out there on the subject.

    If you go on to the website of the guy who calls himself the "Diet Doctor" he will be discussing and citing all the current research supporting his pet project of "Low Carb - High Fat" diets. Putting very convincing spins on all of it. And you come away thinking "That was great information".

    Until you find a website promoting the opposite "Low Fat High Carb" diet and you find they have just as many citations, are just as good at spinning them, and their websites are just as shiny and professional looking and convincing.

    2) The second is that much of the information out there is in a format most people can not actually read for themselves.

    I am actually trained in reading and interpreting Science Papers and Journals. Most people are not. And what confounds this even further is the poor standard of "Science Journalism" in our society where they are more interested in a clickable title than reporting science well. Leading to sources like the "Daily Fail" telling us one week how healthy and wonderful some food or drink it - only to tell us another week it will give you cancer and make you unhealthy. I have lost it now but I used to have a link to them actually doing this on the same day in the same paper.

    What makes this worse is how studies and information is funded. Often by the very people who benefit from a particular food or food group being shown in a good light. People who therefore use their money to influence the results to look good, or to bury them unpublished if they do not.

    We are flooded with too much, hard to interpret, often conflicting information. Usually extreme information too as the negative or moderate findings get left unpublished and so confound meta-analysis.

    You say "It is not Rocket Science" but sometimes I think we would be better off if it was!


  • Registered Users Posts: 7,761 ✭✭✭Pinch Flat


    Eat less, especially processed ****e
    Less take always. We’ve Become a fast food nation.
    Cook st home more - fresh food - and impart this knowledge to kids
    Move move

    The nation has become very sedentary - most people are driven (school kids) or drive (college / secondary school children), people working. Agree that some have to, but a lot don’t have to either.

    People need to consider walking or cycling more. A crazy amount of car journeys are very short.


  • Registered Users Posts: 12,696 ✭✭✭✭Dtp1979


    Far far too many kids getting carted to school 1/2 a mile down the road. Then they’re carted home and handed a tablet or stuck in from of the x box and fed processed food. There’s still so many parents who don’t know how to feed kids, or themselves, properly




  • Pinch Flat wrote: »
    Eat less, especially processed ****e Less take always. We’ve Become a fast food nation. Cook st home more - fresh food - and impart this knowledge to kids Move move

    I am certainly healthier than I was in college. And I eat _significantly_ more food than I did back then. In college I basically ate one meal a day - usually something like an oven pizza.

    Now I eat 4 or 5 meals a day and any one of them in terms of quantity alone is more than I was eating in an entire day in college times. And I am now much slimmer, healthier, more flexible, fitter and more powerful.

    Sure some of that is related to me having moved to a more active lifestyle. I would be erring slightly towards extreme in just how active I am now. But the increase in my activity while extreme does not scale with the 6-800% fold increase in my intake.

    So I think your paragraph above would be just as good - if not much better - by simply dropping off the first two words. Eating less is simply not a requirement. How and what one eats is more important.

    I think overall the problem is that we tend to focus on _one_ factor to explain obesity in our heads. Some people latch on to fast food. Others to sedentary lifestyles. Others will focus on aggressive food marketing causing people to over eat.

    As obesity researcher David Allison says "What seems intuitively to be right is not always right." and that a rush to judgement can have "negative effects". And he points out that quite a number of studies actually failed to verify the correlation between PE in schools, Soft Drinks, and fast food and obesity. Or where it verified them, the correlation was much smaller than expected.

    While other factors have been downplayed sometimes. Not getting enough sleep for example has correlated with over eating. Also since we are warm blooded animals a significant % of the calories we intake is used in regulating our body temperature. But modern clothing and technology like Air Conditioning has essentially had us "outsource" that work and so these calories are freed up.

    Interestingly smoking suppresses appetite so if there is a reduction in smoking in a country it is possible you will see a correlating increase in average food consumption.

    In the end it of course comes down to what you eat - how you eat - and how you move. But there still is a rainbow of factors and variables in play that can have all kinds of influences.

    For me the biggest part appears to be cultural. But I have no citations or studies to back up that impression at this time. It just feels to me like meals for many have become a hurdle to get over/past in our day so we can get back to all the other things vying for our attention. Whereas in my house for me they are an event in and of themselves and the focus of much of my day and my attention - and we eat mindfully not while doing something else or while rushing to get back to something else.

    And that cultural shift means people are more inclined to eat quick and nasty. Fast foods. Processed Foods. Ready Meals. Quick Fixes. And incentives or disincentives like Sugar Taxes are not likely to cause the more central Cultural Shifts I think are likely to be required to combat any Obesity Issues real or imagined.


  • Moderators, Sports Moderators Posts: 20,364 Mod ✭✭✭✭RacoonQueen


    rob316 wrote: »
    Picks up the 20% fat as opposed to the 5%. Simple choices can make a huge difference.

    Nothing wrong with higher fat mince. It's not high fat meat making people fat.
    Yes, I understand this.
    I just think to have a healthy lifestyle and diet isimportant.
    Sometimes people focus to much on BMI.
    Now I'm not for a second encouraging people to be over weight.
    GAA Beo wrote: »
    Yeah I think the BMI thing is overplayed. Most rugby players and weightlifters would be called overweight/obese on the BMI scale.

    BMI is hugely important. Weightlifters and rugby players are not the people BMI targets. It is a good guide for people who don't have low body fat % to gauge where they are. I find it hilarious when people who do not have the body of a weightlifter or rugby player and would probably have a high BMI talking about how BMI is rubbish because it would mark a rugby player as obese. THAT DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU :rolleyes:
    pwurple wrote: »
    Change to a 4 day working week.

    Office workers are expected to do two or three jobs... Their paid work, look after their homes and families, and also exercise and keep healthy. The third gets dropped because there aren't enough free hours to get it all done.

    Why the feck, in this age of automation, are we all working such ridiculous hours behind desks.

    We should be on 10 hour weeks at this stage.

    That's rubbish. It's laziness. A lot of people manage work/study/family/activity.
    The cycling/triathlon/running/fitness forums are full of people who spend multiple hours a week training on top of work and family life.
    People go home in the evenings and watch TV, they have plenty of time for exercise or to prep healthy meals they are just too lazy to do it.


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  • Closed Accounts Posts: 3,482 ✭✭✭Gimme A Pound


    If I eat a diet yogurt or drink a diet fizzy drink, I will be absolutely starving. Tinfoil hat alert: the diet foods industry needs you to fail so that you keep buying its products.


  • Registered Users Posts: 68,317 ✭✭✭✭seamus


    Make parents buy a €1,000/year licence to drive their kids to school. Force all companies to charge BIK on their provided parking spaces.

    Get people off their lazy holes and walk or cycle their commutes.


  • Registered Users Posts: 28,703 ✭✭✭✭Wanderer78


    seamus wrote:
    Make parents buy a €1,000/year licence to drive their kids to school. Force all companies to charge BIK on their provided parking spaces.


    More taxes rock, people always change their approaches when taxes are increased, don't they?


  • Moderators, Computer Games Moderators Posts: 15,225 Mod ✭✭✭✭FutureGuy


    Stop drinking fruit juices and fizzy drinks.
    Cut out white breads and pasta and keep carbs in check.
    Don't eat or drink after 6 pm except water and black coffee (no sugar).
    Eat good fats.
    Drink water.
    Exercise 3 x 30 min/week where you build up a sweat.

    It's not rocket science.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 3,482 ✭✭✭Gimme A Pound


    "Don't eat after 6pm" - why? What if you go for a run or to the gym after 6pm? That rule is completely arbitrary. And it is starving oneself too. What if you finish your dinner at 6 and go to bed at 11.30? And i finish work at 6 so I don't eat dinner until nearly 7.

    What if you just eat salad after 6?


  • Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,027 Mod ✭✭✭✭Wibbs



    I am actually trained in reading and interpreting Science Papers and Journals. Most people are not. And what confounds this even further is the poor standard of "Science Journalism" in our society where they are more interested in a clickable title than reporting science well. Leading to sources like the "Daily Fail" telling us one week how healthy and wonderful some food or drink it - only to tell us another week it will give you cancer and make you unhealthy. I have lost it now but I used to have a link to them actually doing this on the same day in the same paper.

    What makes this worse is how studies and information is funded. Often by the very people who benefit from a particular food or food group being shown in a good light. People who therefore use their money to influence the results to look good, or to bury them unpublished if they do not.
    This plus a bazillion. There are concerns in a few disciplines that too many studies are sloppy, or have bad data, even if not funded by biased sources and then on top you have the media ever hungry for more stuff to publish to vie for our attention.

    Rejoice in the awareness of feeling stupid, for that’s how you end up learning new things. If you’re not aware you’re stupid, you probably are.





  • Wanderer78 wrote: »
    More taxes rock, people always change their approaches when taxes are increased, don't they?

    Yes and no it seems. The "Regressive" Soda Tax in the US is a good example. A study there suggested that implementing such a tax could have a weight effect of up to 8 pounds a year on Americans.

    The studies were of two types of tax. A % tax and a fixed rate tax. I think if I recall both were "20" as in 20% and 20cent.

    The % increase had less of an effect - 3 pounds I think it was - but more wide reaching. In that a reduction was observed for Americans of all wealth classes. The 20 cent hit had a more dramatic effect of the 8 pounds observation but it seemed to only hit the middle classes significantly. The upper classes just paid that money anyway cause they could. The poorer classes worked around it - waiting for sales or buying in bulk or other means to get their soda cheaper.

    Following all that other studies showed that just because people were taking on less soda - that did not mean they were not finding their calories elsewhere.

    So it seems that behaviours do change with a tax quite often - but sometimes the wrong people or the wrong way - or that behaviour is balanced off by a secondary change elsewhere that simply reverses whatever positive effect the tax itself was hoping to engender. So taxation is a useful tool to have in our arsenal it seems - but actually deploying it correctly or usefully is probably something we are not yet all that good at.
    Wibbs wrote: »
    This plus a bazillion. There are concerns in a few disciplines that too many studies are sloppy, or have bad data, even if not funded by biased sources and then on top you have the media ever hungry for more stuff to publish to vie for our attention.

    Agreed. But my gut feeling - subjective really - is that the only thing worse than the sloppy studies or the bad data is the wealth of entirely unpublished studies. It confounds meta analysis - removes from access studies that likely were done well with good data - and fuels the potential for what studies are published to seem more significant in isolation to people like Media clickbait manufacturers who want to hype them.

    If we could target the entire word of unpublished research and do it well - it would mediate the effect of bad studies and poor methods and data on our knowledge as a whole.


  • Registered Users Posts: 28,703 ✭✭✭✭Wanderer78


    "Don't eat after 6pm" - why? What if you go for a run or to the gym after 6pm? That rule is completely arbitrary. And it is starving oneself too. What if you finish your dinner at 6 and go to bed at 11.30? And i finish work at 6 so I don't eat dinner until nearly 7.


    What if you work shifts?


  • Registered Users Posts: 12,696 ✭✭✭✭Dtp1979


    "Don't eat after 6pm" - why? What if you go for a run or to the gym after 6pm? That rule is completely arbitrary. And it is starving oneself too. What if you finish your dinner at 6 and go to bed at 11.30? And i finish work at 6 so I don't eat dinner until nearly 7.

    What if you just eat salad after 6?

    The time of day that you eat has no bearing on your weight gain/loss. It’s all down to calories


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  • Registered Users Posts: 32,803 ✭✭✭✭NIMAN


    It would help if the schools actually had a proper PE class.

    My kids school do 1hr of PE per week.

    Yet maybe 5hrs of religion.

    Should be the reverse.


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