Posts by B Jones
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Juice and/or fizzy in baby bottles is what gets the media coverage and the outrage going, but equally harmful things like putting kids to bed with a bottle are considered normal kind parenting by many many people. Focusing on the former at the expense of the latter feels more like a moral panic than a genuine health initiative. It's easier to point the finger at a media myth (like Danielle said, who actually does that?) than change something people see as normal. See also: adults complaining about underage drinking when overage drinking is just as problematic.
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That would be because they're trying to prevent serious tooth decay in pre-schoolers. Milk sugar on your teeth all night is not good for them.
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If there's one thing that bugs me about the healthy eating movement it's the success of marketers to brand their product as healthy, regardless of how truthful that is. Light olive oil - just as high calorie as any other kind of oil or fat. Fruit juice - full of sugar, sometimes more than fizzy drink. Sugar alternatives like honey or coconut sugar or whatnot - dude, it's all still glucose, fructose and sucrose. Sultanas are very high in sugar, and sticky so they keep applying it to your teeth over a longer period. Sweetened yoghurt, similar. There are many more people who think fruit juice is healthy for kids than there are people who stick Fanta in babies' bottles.
If the problem is total energy intake, switching to other energy sources doesn't necessarily fix the problem.
If you bake it but don't eat it yourself, that's called externalising the costs :)
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to Katharine Moody,
Who'd a thought homemade pasta sauce could become so controversial, eh?
You also mentioned delicious chocolate cake. Coincidentally, I made two of those last night between comments, and in doing so got a reminder about how much butter and sugar goes into them. Nobody here has so far mentioned the way baked goods are fetishized by middle class women in particular, when they're arguably just as calorie-laden as working class treats like fizzy and takeaways. There are tv shows celebrating baking, and pinterest pages, and competitive cake decorating efforts, and facebook memes about single serving microwave chocolate cakes and so forth. The craft and skill that goes into them doesn't add any nutritional value, but it does seem to get it off the hook for awareness campaigns and general do-gooding.
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Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing. Good intentions don't necessarily make for good results - see Homeopaths Without Borders. What's lacking in this discussion so far is any perspective from any of the targets of this effort - what they think would help them. And I don't mean the salvation narratives of people who have lost a lot of weight, I mean people who are currently wondering whether they have a health problem and what they could do to fix it without making the rest of their lives unpleasant. I'd have thought that was a basic principle of health interventions.
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I don't want to spend my weekend making pasta sauce because I have better things to do with my time, and I don't have enough room in my fridge or freezer for lots of made-ahead things.
I see bottled bolognese sauce as a kind of gateway drug to cooking for yourself, for folk who have left home without much in the way of cooking skills, and would otherwise subsist on mince on toast. It's the only thing standing between a few lads (and lasses) and scurvy. Making it easier for low kitchen skilled people to cook rather than get takeaways is a good thing.
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to Katharine Moody,
I look at all those bottles of pre-made pasta sauce and wonder why anyone would pay what amounts to 4x the price of the simple set of ingredients.
Because not everyone has the time to chop everything and reduce a tomato sauce for 45 minutes after work while their kids beg for snacks and fight. I make almost all my food from scratch, but buggered if I'm going to turn down a ten minute dinner that the kids like, that is actually pretty good on the healthy eating scale when you stir in veges, pasta and a bit of bacon in the sauce.
Time poverty is a huge contributor to unhealthy eating patterns. Skills - the time and resources to learn to cook and the equipment for it. Better to recognise that and try and make policy changes that change that (more home ec in schools, say, or more flexible working hours) than than tutting about the youth of today and fighting humanity's innate tendency to like sweet, salty and fatty things.
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I have some thoughts on how you might cut through the bureaucracy - write to the Electricity Authority, your DHB, Minister for Energy, Minister of Health and Minister of Social Welfare. Cc them all in on the one letter so they know they'll need to work together on a response. Explain how the process isn't working on the ground as intended - notification is patchy, arranging alternative supply is difficult and expensive. People's lives are in danger because there's no joined up government solutions here. Suggest a joined up solution, especially if it isn't an expensive one (say, power cos provide numbers of medically dependent customers to DHBs, who using that data can purchase a few spare power supplies to lend out for planned power outages, which may not affect more than a handful of people at once), explain the costs of not providing it (hospital nights, risk to health), and see what happens. It may not have any direct results for a while, but I can't think of an obvious roadblock like it being contrary to government policy or so forth.
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It's a problem when anything gets so complicated that people have to specialise. Your average electrician would have few professional opportunities to think about their service from the point of view of a person needing 24/7 medical equipment. Your average disability support worker would have few professional opportunities to muck around with a car battery and an inverter. They might know what people do in hospitals, but not in server rooms. And your bureaucrat might be good at getting all the stakeholders in a room, nutting out a solution and socialising it so that one person's innovation can spread, but they may not have any visibility of the problem at all, plus no direct experience with medical equipment or car batteries. This kind of group discussion is rare in meatspace.
The solution? Meetings :-) Or at least, making sure that in our complicated lives there are plenty of opportunities for people with different skill sets and priorities to shoot the breeze and look at something through a different pair of eyes.
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Access: How many agencies does it take…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
There are 20 DHBs, about 15 NASCs and numerous power companies in New Zealand. You would think there was a standard process for dealing with these issues.
Well, that's the problem right there. The more people there are responsible for an outcome, the less likely that outcome will be achieved.