Sugar as a healthier option?

Hard to imagine how you did that Waitrose, given all the publicity about escalating rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. 

Your current promotion is entitled “Kick Start Your Health”, with special displays, recommended recipes and 25% discounts on supposedly healthier ingredients. How on earth did this become a prominent promotional display, featuring banks of golden caster sugar (25% off)?  It stopped me in my tracks when walking into my local store.

After some discussion with you, Waitrose, I now realise that the whole display relates to a free recipe for scones, upgraded with carrots and pumpkin seeds aimed at making them “healthier”. Ironic that fruit scones are one of the few types of cake that can be made without added sugar. (Though they do cry out to be smothered with cream and jam, thus cancelling out any low-sugar credibility.)

When I cornered one of your senior managers in my local store he was defensive about the recipe, telling me, “It’s healthier because it contains carrots and seeds”. When “Oh no!  how did we get it so wrong?” might have been more convincing.

In a written response on your Facebook page, I got more of the same, passed down from “the team in head office”. I conclude, Waitrose, that you are  still not seeing this from the point of view of your customer.

Did no one on “the team” spot that customers, who did not have recipe leaflet in their hands, would either:

a)    be somewhere on the spectrum between bemused and outraged that sugar was being         promoted as healthy 

or

b) think that this light brown sugar was a “healthy” product?

How did you mess up so badly? And why, when I point out your error, do you persist in talking about the recipe? I am disappointed and definitely in the outraged camp, to see that such a reputable food retailer has got “healthy eating” so badly wrong.

Parental love is blind

Some interesting health news this week is that parents don’t seem to notice when their children are overweight.

In a study of nearly 3,000 families, only four parents thought that their child was overweight. It also found that 31% of the parents tended to underestimate the weight of their child. Experts are agreed however that one in five British children are significantly overweight, so these results  are cause for concern. How on earth do you motivate parents to turn this tide if they are just not seeing weight gain in their own offspring?

One theory is that we have, as a society, lost our sense of what normal weight looks like. This is possibly true. Then there is the increased amount of cheap junk food available and the fact that children are less active than their parents were when they were young.

I have a couple more thoughts about the reasons for this mismatch in parental perception, both of which are rooted in individual psychology rather than factors in society.

One is that we all tend to find chubby babies, and things that look like chubby babies, appealing. This was first identified by Konrad Lorenz, who studied animal behaviour in the mid 20^th century.  Lorenz proposed that nurturing responses in humans are “released” by baby-like features - round chubby faces, etc. This idea has been used to explain the appeal of those breeds of dogs and cats that have been bred to have human-baby-like faces. It’s normal to have a round face and a layer of sub-cutaneous fat when you are a few months old but not when you are eight or nine. However this possibly-innate nurturing response could, in part, explain why parents, seeing their older child looking rounded and baby-like just think “Aaah! Isn’t he/she still my cute, chubby baby!”

You could take this a little further – although it this is just hypothetical. Assume Lorenz was right and that baby-like appearance stimulates nurturing. Part of nurturing is to offer food. If it looks like a baby – protect it and feed it!  This is certainly the case in Lorenz’s beloved bird world. A parent bird sees the brightly-coloured gaping mouth of a nestling and stuffs in worms. So it’s just possible that the chubbier the child the more its parents are stimulated into feeding it. A bit like the hedge sparrow, frantically feeding a huge baby cuckoo that has taken over its nest.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that parents (and doting grandparents) tend to think their own child is beautiful. It seems to be part of the human bonding process – a bit like when adults fall in love. When we go to the primary school concert we are not much interested in looking at the other children. We only have eyes for our own little darlings. Others may, in passing, seem pretty or plain, but our own are always the most beautiful in our eyes.  Love, as they say, is blind and parental love is no exception.

If these instinctive forces are at work, albeit fuelled by the availability of cheap junk foods, a decrease in activity and children’s cuckoo-like tendency beg for sweet treats, the increasing weight of children may be an even harder tide to turn.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-32069699

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/eat.2260150408/abstract  This is a link to another study in which the majority of respondents were found to be basically satisfied with their child's physical appearance, eating habits, and exercise behavior.

Heartburn, cancer and timing

It’s end of January, winter is doing its worst in terms of seasonal infections and busy General Practitioners across the UK are under even more pressure than usual. I expect a few of them gave a weary sigh at the timing of Public Health England’s exhortations to be more aware of the symptoms of oesophageal cancer and to see your doctor if you have persistent heartburn. The trouble with all this “awareness raising” is that there is no particular evidence that it will cut cancer deaths or change any other health-related behaviour. So maybe this particular announcement could have waited a couple of months.

Heartburn and difficulty swallowing can be signs of cancer but they are usually caused by a weak or damaged valve at the top of the stomach and reflux of gastric contents. Heartburn is incredibly common in the over 40s. It’s exacerbated by obesity – belly fat in particular, which crowds the stomach and pushes stomach acid backwards.

The most common treatment is acid blocking drugs but it can also be greatly reduced by weight loss and other self help measures outlined in my latest book.

Doctors can only properly diagnose cancer by referring the patient to the hospital for an endoscopic examination (by a thin, fibre-optic tube) and if everyone with heartburn was referred, the waiting times would be very long indeed. This could in theory slow down diagnosis of cancer - if the queue is clogged up by the worried well. So unless there are other symptoms (such as weight loss or serious difficulty swallowing) the doctor’s first action is likely to be try the acid blocking drugs and see if the symptoms are relieved.

Reflux is not only a symptom, it's one of the causes of cancer of the oesophagus (if it persists for a long time). So long-term heartburn martyrdom should definitely be avoided. Another cause is regular consumption of strong alcohol. It may well be that the reason that deaths from oesophageal cancer are climbing, and are higher in Britain than other European countries, is that us British are more overweight and drink more excessively than other nations.

Public Health England make it sound like simple issue – if more people know the symptoms, more people will go to the doctor, then more people will get diagnosed earlier and more lives will be saved. I fear that it not an easy fix and until someone comes up with a way of enthusing the British with the benefits of a healthier lifestyle the incidence of this cancer will continue to rise.

Be Clear on Cancer – Public Health England Press Release http://bit.ly/1BkuUT8