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A FAIRER START IN LIFE FOR ALL KIDS? (SUGARY DRINKS BAN)

R

rory robertson

Active Member
Greetings - and happy National Diabetes Week (Australia), 14–20 July. Yes, I am Australian. Yes, the cricket is a disaster for us. :oops: Next topic!

Sugary drinks are making the world's kids fat and diabetic (link below). Who will join with me in promoting a ban in all sugary drinks in all schools in the UK, Australia, Europe, US, Mexico, Asia, Africa, everywhere, to help give children across the world a fairer, healthier start in life?

If you think I make a good case, please pass it on. If you think I am an idiot with my facts all wrong, chop me up with ridicule. :lol: There is plenty of background info/ammunition for you to start with in Section 4.

My brief discussion in the following link is organised as follows:

1. Why the proposed ban (sugary drinks are a key driver of global obesity and obesity)

2. Problems with Australia’s existing bans on sugary drinks in schools

3. Resources to help educate our kids, parents, teachers, doctors

4. Background on Rory Robertson

Readers, if after assessing the facts you think the proposal for banning all sugary drinks in all schools globally has merit, please forward this piece to parents, students, teachers, principals and heads of schools, nurses, doctors, dentists and others involved in public health and education. :thumbup:

http://www.australianparadox.com/pdf/Su ... ks-Ban.pdf

Regards,
Rory
 
rory robertson said:
Sugary drinks are making the world's kids fat and diabetic (link below). Who will join with me in promoting a ban in all sugary drinks in all schools in the UK, Australia, Europe, US, Mexico, Asia, Africa, everywhere, to help give children across the world a fairer, healthier start in life?
Click to expand...

We had a couple of sugary drink producers plus a couple of large producers of boiled sweets in my town. There were only two 'fat kids' out of 1000 in our school and they were still able to participate in school sports. One had a mother who was very ill and his father, a teacher at the school, had turned to alcohol. All rest were quite skinny because they played outside most of the day and at school breaks. Everyone had bikes, many joined the scouts and cars were so few and far between we even used to play with a soccer ball in the road, a common enough game called 'slam'. We had a tuck shop and freshly baked iced buns with raisins were on sale during morning break, to accompany the free school milk. Most walked to school or had a long walk to the bus stop.

Since then school dinners are servings of convenience foods. Parents drive the kids to school. The school playing fields have been sold off for housing devlopment and kids are banned from most forms of play because of 'health and safety'. I don't see kids out on their bikes during the school holidays or at weekends or even playing soccer at the local rec. They're all into digital forms of entertainment. I heard a school yesterday trumpet the fact that they had secured the services of a 'real PE teacher' for one day per week. What happened? We used to have 4 permanent members of the PE staff plus several other teachers who did it as a secondary subject. In addition to PE lessons and Games lessons we had 'houses' and inter house soccer, rugby, hockey, cross country leagues in the winter with athletics, tennis and cricket in the summer term plus swimming galas and water polo.

Banning is rarely a good thing. It's nearly always better to encourage something positive. Hard for a school to do though if the parents' can't see the point and the current generation of kids are being raised by the generation who were raised when all the changes were happening.
 
Hi Yorksman. Things have moved on a bit since we both were kids, born as I was in 1966. More and more kids now are getting fatter and sicker. And lots of kids and parents have little idea about how it started and how it can be stopped. One key purpose of the ban is to send a strong message on the fact that sugary drinks probably are the single-biggest driver of the disturbing global trends towards obesity and type 2 diabetes, together the greatest public health-challenge of our times: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2963518/

"CONCLUSIONS
In addition to weight gain, higher consumption of SSBs is associated with development of metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes. These data provide empirical evidence that intake of SSBs should be limited to reduce obesity-related risk of chronic metabolic diseases."
 
Comprehensive food and nutrient-based standards for maintained schools in England became statutory in primary schools from 2008 and secondary schools from 2009. They cover food and drink served at lunchtime, and throughout the school day. This applies to all maintained schools and academies which have compliance with the food standards included in their funding agreements

The standards cover all food sold or served in schools:
• breakfast, lunch and after-school meals
• tuck, vending, mid-morning break and after-school clubs
Click to expand...

http://www.education.gov.uk/schools/adm ... -standards
Lists of drinks allowed here: A small amount of sugar is allowed in milky drinks like cocoa (<5% added sugar or honey to the milk component of the drink)
http://www.childrensfoodtrust.org.uk/as ... _table.pdf
Many schools also ban fizzy drinks in packed lunches.
This is a typical statement from a school leaflet, it's very similar to the one at my grandchildren's school.
Packed lunches should not contain crisps, sweets or fizzy drinks
Click to expand...
The children are encouraged to drink water and again to quote
snacks must be small so as not to spoil the child’s appetite for lunch....No sweets or chocolate are allowed. The ideal snack is a piece of fruit (oranges should be peeled if the child cannot do it themselves) or vegetable or piece of cheese etc.
Click to expand...
 
Yes, phoenix, there has been some great work done in the past decade or so, in restricting access to sugary drinks and foods, in the UK, Australia and elsewhere.

In Australia, however, progress has been patchy. The State-based bans on sugary drinks in schools that were introduced in the 2000s now are looking narrow and ineffective, for at least three reasons:

(i) Evidence that sugary drinks are a menace to public health has become much stronger in the years since “bans” were first introduced - http://www.schools.nsw.edu.au/media/dow ... _flyer.pdf - and so the need for children to avoid sugary drinks has intensified (also see Resources, in my original link).

(ii) Complicated rules are unhelpful in terms of promoting compliance: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21463405

(iii) Food and beverage companies naturally respond to narrow rules by engineering new unhealthy choices that contain precisely the right amount of added sugar, salt and fat to slip under the regulatory bar while still maximising the addictive/moreish nature of the product, thus continuing to promote over-consumption by children and adults (see Salt Sugar Fat in Resources);

Accordingly, in my opinion, the time is ripe for a new, simple and effective policy ban on sugary drinks – Plain water and plain milk are the only drinks available to children - in all Australian schools, providing a model for schools globally.

Moreover, other food and drink providers with “captive” children – including hospitals and airlines (see a recent example of the latter in Resources) - should scale back access to unhealthy products, embracing the "Plain water and plain milk only" policy.

Finally, I think doctors and nurses globally should be instructed by their governments to advise their patients – especially in cases involving overweight/obesity and type 2 diabetes – to avoid the sweet stuff, in order to promote reduced weight, increased exercise and improved health.
 
rory robertson said:
Hi Yorksman. Things have moved on a bit since we both were kids, born as I was in 1966. More and more kids now are getting fatter and sicker. And lots of kids and parents have little idea about how it started and how it can be stopped
Click to expand...

But a ban won't stop it. Cannabis is illegal, but easily purchased in schools. When Jamie Oliver, a TV chef, campaigned for healthy food at school lunchtimes, kids were prevented from going home where it was suspected that they would be given junk food. All that happened was that the mum came to school with fish and chips wrapped up and shoved them through the school railings. In Africa a big problem has been that young mothers, believing in bottled milk, in particular the bottle element, fed their babies on coca cola in a milk bottle. The coca cola is not the problem here, it's the parenting. Sometimes, as with this example, it's stupidity but sometimes it's a mistaken belief, eg that feeding the kids large amounts of currants and sultanas is good, because they are natural. Occasionally it is laziness, for example putting ribena in a baby's teet to keep it quiet. It's the parents you need to target, not the drinks.

"It was a bizarre sight: three mums passing buns to their kids through a school's iron railings, for all the world like daytrippers feeding animals at the zoo. "Sinner ladies" they were labelled, campaigners against Jamie Oliverism and what one of the women involved, in an unwise moment, called the "rabbit food" that the school was insisting on feeding to their children."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/200 ... ls.schools

The other problem is to do with unemployment and welfare. Outside the bakers is a long queue of kids waiting for a bacon and egg butty, plus chocolate brownie or other muffin, on their way to school. Invariably this is supplemented with chocolate bars and other sweet snacks for the rest of the day. Mum is still in bed as is dad, if he is still around. The kids are simply told to get some cash out of mum's purse and go to the bakers for breakfast. Mum, when she eventually gets up, will go shopping still in her nightgown, sometimes even to the supermarket.

Cover up! No shopping in PJs or barefoot, Tesco tells shoppers as it becomes first supermarket to unveil a dress code

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -code.html
 
rory robertson said:
Accordingly, in my opinion, the time is ripe for a new, simple and effective policy ban on sugary drinks – Plain water and plain milk are the only drinks available to children - in all Australian schools, providing a model for schools globally.
Click to expand...

If you are the poor unfortunate teacher tasked with searching the kids you suspect of smuggling in cans of pop and then confiscating them, my advice would be to not to travel to work in your own car for you are sure to have it damaged.

And you'll have to live a long way from where you work to avoid a lot of harassment, damage to windows, faeces shoved through your letter box etc. Driving the sugar police away from the school will quickly become a new pastime.

In the USA they don't seem to be able to stop kids taking guns to school.
 
Yes, obviously 100% compliance is not going to happen, nor anything like it. Again, Yorksman, a key point of the ban is to make sure kids and parents get high-profile exposure to the need to avoid sugary drinks and foods, to avoid obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and related maladies.

Too many kids still are smoking, but most are not, because almost all parents and kids now know that it is a silly high-risk activity. That sugary drinks and sugary processed foods are a disaster for personal and public health is the next cab off that rank. Within a decade or two, I reckon, dietary sugar will be near the top of the list of public-health pariahs, alongside tobacco, alcohol and drunk-driving.

The proposed ban on sugary drinks in schools I think has great potential to provide a major fillip to Indigenous health in Australia and elsewhere, given that giant-sized servings of sugar – alongside alcohol and tobacco – are a major driver of the unacceptable “gap” in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians: (bottom row of Box 2/Table 2 and “Comments”) https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2013/198 ... -australia ;
http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats ... 55001_2004
-05.pdf
 
You ban them in schools and the kids will get the sugary drinks elsewhere. My lad's secondary school banned sweets and sugary pop in vending machines as a trial period, all the kids did was to purchase them before school, during lunch or after school, some of the kids were bulk buying sweets and bringing them to school in their rucksacks and selling them for a small fortune :lol:

Education is the key as bans don't work IMHO.
 
Some parents like those passing high fat deep fried junk through the school railings as some kind of "stand up for your right to be stupid" need to have their *rs*s kicked. They are harming their children's health and any attempts to educate people are met with "the nanny state telling us what to do". Quite honestly, people who feed their kids high fat, high sugar, low nutrition junk are effectively sabotaging their children's health.They're often the very ones who claim that their smoking pays for the NHS. Unfortunately you can't tax stupidity.


Sent from the Diabetes Forum App
 
This is starting to remind me of Sweden's recent policy of compulsary sterilisation which was still practiced in the 1970s. One poor girl was sterilised because her parents and grandparents were on state welfare and the state reasoned that she too would be degenerate and become a burden on the state. It was therefore in everyone's best interest that she be prevented from breeding.
 
Yorksman said:
noblehead said:
some of the kids were bulk buying sweets and bringing them to school in their rucksacks and selling them for a small fortune :lol:
Click to expand...

Was one of them Alan Sugar by any chance?
Click to expand...


I think there was a few aspiring Alan Sugar's, they had a right Black Market economy going and were really peeved off when they allowed the vending machine back in :)
 
You can't tax stupidity, but you can tax sugar. I'm against a ban though. The kids will still be fat because they still won't get any exercise, and the parents who are stupid will still be stupid
 
I think awareness is the key. Why are parents stupid? Because everything they see is marketing based. Take cereals (for example) these are a massive product line that is marketed specifically to children and those who are trying to be healthy. Have you seen the amount of sugars and carbs in a bowl of cereal? Sugary drinks have nothing compared to a bowl of cereal. There's more than just one bad thing out there, try everything mass produced.

It's marketing that is the problem. In the UK we still have a medical profession that is recommending low-fat diets to diabetics. Even our doctors don't know what is good for us! The food production industry is one of the biggest ones in the world, and boy have they done a number on the world about what they should eat. People believe what is put in front of their faces every single day, completely unaware that the smiling lady on the TV is giving advice based on how much she's being paid to by marketing execs. And trust me I know. I worked in marketing for ten years.

Prior to diabetes and gaining some awareness about food, I would have considered myself an intelligent and well informed person who thought that a good diet was cereal for breakfast, a low fat pasta salad for lunch and a baked potato and beans for dinner. I'd done my research. I'd followed the popular concensus about food--what could possibly go wrong? I couldn't understand why my body craved fats or why my weight bounced around like a yo yo, and I'd put the weight back on when I came off the diet. No wonder I ended up diabetic on that kind of diet!

The point is, that it is lack of knowledge and lack of awareness that causes most people to be unaware of what is good and what it bad for them. As the average person, all I knew about low-carb diets was that a lot of people said they were bad. Atkins got hammered in the press with tons of anti-marketing-based media. And in retrospect, I have to wonder who was behind paying for that to happen. What massive industry can control the press, and even has their fingers in the medical testing on food---hmm...is it perhaps the food industry?

I'm now trying to tell all my friends what is a better diet for them. Every single one of them has fought tooth and nail to believe the media. It's been drummed into them for years what a good diet is. From my own experience, I can honestly say that most people don't know what is good for them. These are intelligent and open-minded people who have been overloaded with media driven information and misinformed for a lifetime.

Where do we gain knowledge about a good diet? Our doctors, our peers and the media (TV and magazines). This is where most people gain their knowledge of a good diet from. Well, if the doctors advise low fat diets, our peers are as disallusioned as we are, and the media tells us a marketed version of a 'good diet' that is fuelled by back handers from food production companies then I'd say that most people are misinformed, and the only cure for that is to create awareness. Take on the bad marketing with factual awareness about food.

You know I posted an article about my low-carb diet when I first started mine. I don't get many visitors to my personal blog. It's just friends. In fact, I've never had a stranger drop by it before. It's a small blog that doesn't get seen much by the world at large. When I posted about low carb diets, I instantly got a comment on it from a random stranger, who twisted my words to try to claim that 'carbs were good for diabetics'. Now, that could have been an angry diabetic who was misinformed, but since it was on my author blog and a one off post, it's unlikely a diabetic would drop by it. I firmly believe it was online anti-marketing of some kind. People aren't aware of it, but the dark side of marketing industry is skanky as hell, and they will do anything to sell a product. I'd mentioned 'Special K' in my post in a derogatory way, it probably appeared in the search results. So anyone trying to create awareness, prepare for a battle to get the words out.

Bans won't change public opinion as much as awareness will. That means a lot of people standing up and creating websites and organisations that are dedicated to debunking bad information that is rife in marketing.

It's not just food. Beauty products are another bad one. Sulphates (the drug that makes your skin and hair addicted to a product so when you stop using it your body reacts badly so you have to buy more of the product to fix it). Parabens (the chemical that can cause cancer). I think Pantene even put plastic wrap over people's hair and suffocate it to make it 'shiny'.

I was very lucky in that one of my peers knew a lot about good nutritional diets for diabetics. But if you want to reduce sugar and make the world safe for children, then you need to take on the food production industry who create obesity. Their power comes from their consumers. Make consumers aware of what they are eating and of a healthy alternative, and the food industry will have to start making healthier food rather than throwing cheap sugars and carbs into everything they make, or they'll lose billions in revenue. Alas, money talks. Take away their customers. That'll make them change the recipe.

I also agree that school sports are vital, especially now in the internet driven world. They should be hiring more PE teachers and teaching regular exercise every morning in schools in this day and age because most kids will be sitting behind a computer for the rest of the day. When I was at school we had PE twice a week and gym once a week, which probably stopped me being a diabetic teenager, well that and my mother's affinity to adding soya flour to everything she baked.
 
Great post Claire! and I just want to add an observation I made in Tesco's last week and I looked on the back of a box of 'Sugar puffs'..it started out well with the 'Honey monster' giving a weeks worth of daily tips to keep active.."Great" I thought until I read his advice for saturday which said 'something' like or along the lines of.. "after all your hard work make sure to ask mum for an extra large second bowl of delicious,nutritious sugar Puffs for breakfast" Jeez!! no wonder kids are getting obese... :thumbdown:
 
I retired from teaching totally [having spent some years working supply or part-time] about 10 years ago.
Even then the biggest barrier to getting the kids a healthy diet, was PARENTS!
I suspect that the affluent Western World needs a total cultrure transplant. Get parents to guide their kids to a healthy diet.[ not the current low fat high sugar fashion!] First we'll have to educate a whole generation. Starting with those that are tiny now. there's too much available choice of junk and it's CHEAP! I even have a battle with my own grandchildren, whose parents let them choose unhealthy stuff and if I offer fresh veg, they simply won't eat it.
There's a thread on this board currently concerning someone who feels he/she cannot keep to the healthy stuff and is giving up on it. In addition there's been a history of rubbishing the low carbers and opting for more medication.
we need to get right away from processed calories masquerading as food.
Hana
 
hanadr said:
I suspect that the affluent Western World needs a total cultrure transplant
Click to expand...

The western countries have much lower rates Hana, despite the hype in the media. According to this paper, http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ije/2012/902873/tab2/ those with an incidence of DM II at 10% or greater are:

Kuwait
Lebanon
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Bahrain
UAE
Egypt
Mexico
Libya
Jordan
Oman
Syria
Russia

The USA is just outside with an incidence of 9.5% and the Uk is 5.3%.

You're probably right about affluence being a key part though In addition the oil producing countries, the pacific island of Nauru is a case in point. Before the exploitation of phosphate, Nauruans lived in typically physically active Pacific Island style and ate a low-fat diet of fish and native fruit and vegetables. But, by the 1970s this tiny nation had become one of the wealthiest countries in the world – and with its new-found wealth and associated lifestyle changes, had also achieved one of the highest rates of diabetes in the world at over 30%.
 
I quite agree Hana! sowing the seeds early is what is required..it's not going to be easy for sure..I am making small but steady progress with my children with proper,natural foods and although it's not a walk in a park they do prefer some of the changes I've implemented..I'm driven by a TOTAL mission that they grow up to be healthier than me.
 
Education does start at home, however we all know that what constitutes a healthy diet is open to interpretation...... what one may think is a healthy diet another might disagree, the various diets followed by members of this forum is a prime example :thumbup:
 
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