The cruel facts about the `rich` diet

A launch with a double meaning: 

"This week saw the launch of Guy`s and St Thomas` Charity` report `Bite Size Breaking down the challenge of inner city childhood obesity.` Rising childhood obesity is often seen as a classic wicked issue, rising inexorably around the world year after year. It also varies by geographical area and social class, cruelly concentrated in the most disadvantaged areas and populations – a hollow irony for a so-called ‘disease of affluence’."

"The new report, which BIT contributed to, stresses that most of our daily decisions are automatic. Deciding what we eat, whether that quick pre-meeting lunch or late supper, are classic examples of this automatic or "fast" thinking..."

"With many families suffering from a lack of time, money and headspace, the ineffectiveness of effortful interventions is hardly surprising. Perhaps the most important message in the report is that we must make healthier choices as easy as possible for children and their parents."

http://www.behaviouralinsights.co.uk/health/tackling-inner-city-childhood-obesity/

Deprivation, lack of rationality, not having the head space to make healthy decisions are linked together in the video. This may be Guy`s and St Thomas` Charity video, but they did work alongside the Behavioural Insights Team which does know what it is doing. BIT studies know how to influence people. That is why I suggest that there is a subliminal message here. The message is that deprivation, lack of rationality, not having the head space to make healthy decisions are problems of the poor, not problems of the more affluent.

So on one level, this article and the video appear to be about nutrition and a willingness to help the less fortunate, but actually, on another level it is merely a reinforcement of an attitude that is being constantly encouraged. The poor have only themselves to blame. After all they are totally irrational (stupid) but not to worry we (fill in the blanks) are here to help.

Those who truly want to understand obesity and the reason it is increasing globally should look at the food industry. How has it changed?  Why is it that wherever the western food industry goes in the world, so does obesity?

There lies the answer. Inner city childhood obesity is an obfuscation and part of another agenda.