Let the Children Eat Cake

Eating a slice of cake to celebrate a birthday has been banned because it conflicts with the Healthy Eating policy in a Rotherham school (The Yorkshire Post 17 October 2009). The mother of one of the pupils sent a cake to the school so that her daughter could share it with her friends. This incident illustrates the absurdity of the government approach to Healthy Eating in schools.

Although it has been established that diet is related to health it is difficult to devise guidelines which can be used for the population as a whole. This is because there is such a wide variation between individuals in their genetic make-up and in their food consumption patterns. Nevertheless there are compelling reasons to advise people generally to eat plenty of fruit and vegetables and to limit the intake of salt, which is largely present in processed foods. An analysis conducted by the Food Standards Agency has concluded that implementing various healthy eating strategies would save almost 70,000 lives. However 90% of these were linked to increasing consumption of fruit and vegetables to Five-a-Day (42,200)and reducing salt to the recommended level (20,000).  The remaining 10% was attributed to reducing sugar and saturated fat.

Unfortunately there is a tendency for health professionals to be very much more prescriptive than is justified when providing advice on how to construct a healthy diet. There is not a shred of evidence to indicate that an occasional slice of cake does anyone any harm whatsoever. In fact, a slice of cake every day is probably a valuable source of calories for active children. It can also contribute to the variety of a diet. I can do no better than to re-iterate the old cliché that ‘’there are no bad foods …only bad diets!’’ It is perfectly OK to eat a bar of chocolate, a bag of crisps or a pork pie but do not go overboard on these. Foods should not be demonised. Children (and everyone else) need to understand how to construct a balanced diet.

It seems to be the conventional wisdom that the current diet is absolutely awful and is therefore responsible for more and more obesity which results in increasing incidence of the degenerative diseases such as heart attacks and cancers.  The rationale behind the Jamie Oliver campaign on school meals is that the diet of children to-day is so bad that they will have a shorter life span than their parents.

So let us take a look at the facts:

1. The mortality of children has fallen steadily for the past 50 years. In the last 10 years the mortality of boys aged 10-13 has come down by 37%.
2. The National Health Survey of England has found that the health of boys aged 1-15 considered  ‘good/very good ‘  has increased from 90 to 95% between1995 and 2007. There was also an improvement in the health of the girls.
3. The same Survey showed that fruit and vegetable consumption had increased by 25% between 2001  and 2007. Those eating Five-a-Day had increased from 11 to 21%.
4. Although the incidence of obesity in the population as a whole is supposed to be increasing life expectancy  has improved significantly. During the 25-year period ending in 2007, it increased from 77 to 82 in women and from 71 to 77 in men.
5. This apparent paradox can be explained by the results of high quality research conducted in the USA and in Canada. These studies show conclusively that people considered  ‘overweight’ actually live longer than those of ‘normal weight’. In fact there is also evidence to suggest that those in the ‘mildly obese’ category have a longer life than those of normal weight. These results have been totally ignored by the public health authorities in the UK which continue to advocate weight reduction as a means of improving health.

I certainly do not wish to downplay the importance of a nutritious diet as part of a healthy lifestyle and I have been advocating Healthy Eating for the last 30 years. However that is no reason to ignore the facts and distort the evidence.

There are people who are seriously obese and this may well have adverse effects on their health but this should not be used as a justification for developing policies aimed at everyone. It is just as important to consider those who are underweight  –a condition which is linked to poor health and a reduced life expectancy.  Similarly there are some groups of children who are malnourished : hence policies and strategies should be directed specifically towards those at risk. It is not only counter-productive but a waste of valuable resources to develop policies such as the legislation on school meals  which are directed at all children, when over 90% are perfectly healthy. I have been highly critical of this legislation and my views can be found at http://www.healthyeatinginschools.co.uk/

A version of this article was also published in The Yorkshire Post Newspaper 21st Oct 2009and can be seen at http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/opinion/Verner-Wheelock-Let-our-children.5750800.jp