Consequences of diet - Education is best recipe for success

It’s not as if anyone who gave it a moment’s thought hadn’t realised it.

It may be, though, that too many of us don’t give it even a moment’s thought. And, if we do, we too easily choose to ignore damning evidence every time we step up to the interface between pleasure and health. Yesterday’s confirmation that a typical Chinese takeaway may surpass an individual’s total daily requirement of calories identifies one more thing we should consider an indulgence with consequences rather than a sensible, regular lifestyle choice.

Safefood, the all-island body responsible for food safety and healthy eating, also warned that other ethnic foods — Indian, for example — contain too much salt.

It would be dishonest though to pretend that more traditional takeaway meals — fish and chips, a large Coke and, if you’re brave enough, a Mars bar deep-fried in batter — represent the diet of champions.

Interestingly, Safefood suggested that the normally healthy, largely vegetable-based Chinese diet had been “adapted” to satisfy Western cravings for fat, salt, and sugar. The watchdog also suggested that the quantity of food now considered normal was far beyond what was required or healthy.

The conclusions those assertions force on us, in the face of an escalating obesity epidemic, a return of high instances of gout, and a profound tightening in many household budgets, point to choices that are plain stupid.

It seems many of us are indifferent to the consequences of our diet and offend one of the seven deadly sins as well — gluttony.

Of course diet is a matter of free choice — lucky us — and despite persistent State finger-wagging too many of us choose destructive options. Not only that, we are happy to pass unwise eating habits to our children and expect a bankrupt health service to eventually pick up the pieces.

Unfortunately today’s pressures mean that the time needed to prepare good food may not always be available. It is a reality, too, no matter how unfortunate, that the basic cooking skills needed to prepare healthy food may be absent.

There is an irony in the fact that food, its origins, its preparation, and the personalities around it, and all of the discussions and fashions that it provokes, were never more dominant in the public discourse. Food books dominate bestseller lists and food programmes seem the new opiate of the people.

Television chefs have assumed an influence and a status none of their predecessors ever imagined possible.

Organic food is seen as unquestionable and saintly, locally produced is the ultimate label, but genetically modified food crops are seen as something almost Satanic, though these positions are more to do with personal disposition than science.

Despite all of this, and as Safeway yesterday pointed out, too many Irish people needlessly eat poor, health-challenging food. Everything our governments have done so change this, to educate consumers to have better eating habits, have not been as successful as they need to be.

It is time for new educational programmes which will in time more than pay for themselves. After all, how better to cut health spending than to attack one of the avoidable but undeniable causes of obesity?