Unhealthy Society Needs to Change for the Better

For all our technological advances in the last 100 years (and there have been so many) our society today seems to have lost control over some of the most fundamental areas of our life, namely, our own health. With nearly a quarter of all adults and one in seven children in England hitting the obesity mark, it seems ridiculous that such an advanced society can become so unhealthy when we have so much information and knowledge about ourselves and the world we live in. What went wrong?

Obesity has apparently trebled in the past 20 years and diet related disease has increased too along with alcohol misuse. Treating the effects of these things costs the governments health service billions of pounds every year (an estimated £6 billion on diet-related diseases, around £1.8 billion on dealing with the effects of lack of exercise and about £2.7 billion on alcohol related illness). The problem is such that we even have our own Health Secretary in the form of Andrew Lansley who is looking at ways of tackling this problem in our society today.

Lansley is a firm believer in looking at prevention rather than just dealing with the causes and proposes that public health should be more a matter of personal responsibility rather than government action. Rather than treating the problems on the NHS we should be looking at how it can be prevented in the first place? There are many ways this can be done, for example through educating our children, the future generation, at school and also looking at ways of re-educating adults about what they should be doing to lead a healthy lifestyle and how to combat the effects if obesity and health-related issues are already a problem for them.

I am a firm believer in the ‘Everything in moderation’ motto but at the same time I had a fairly decent education and I understand what constitutes a balanced diet and I don’t drink too much (well only occasionally!) and don’t smoke and I try to get plenty of exercise by walking as much as I can and also going jogging once a week. I like to feed my children plenty of fruit and vegetables but they also have their fair share of sweets, just as we enjoy the off pizza or takeaway on a Friday night after a busy week – it’s a treat and we all deserve treats.

This approach of a decent diet (energy in) and a decent amount of exercise (energy out) is how me and my family try to live our lives. I’m not sure really if we really got this basic knowledge from school, I did ‘food and nutrition’ at secondary school in the 80’s and it was more than just ‘cooking’ even then, I learnt about vitamins and what makes a balanced diet and the benefits of fruit and vegetables but I chose this subject as one of my GCSE options, what about the people who didn’t choose it? How do they get their knowledge?

We also learn an awful lot from our parents and families and the meals we eat together. The diet you bring your children up on is very important and a lot of habits are formed when children are small so if you only feed them chips and chicken dippers and beans then that becomes the norm for them. Adding a few vegetables and some fruit into the equation can make a massive difference.

Technology has given us the iPod and the iPhone and the Wii and 3D television which may have been a factor in making some of us into lazy obese people who don’t go out and get enough exercise because we can find out everything we want to know at the touch of a button and the World Wide Web has made everything so accessible that we have no need to make such an effort (we can order our weekly shopping and get it delivered at the click of a button and not even had to take one step to do it).

Technology has also been clever enough to realise that we have become less inclined to get out there and do some exercise (or we have become so busy that we simply think we don’t have time to do it). Technology has developed an answer for this too – toning shoes were invented to help busy people with busy lives get toned whilst they walk and society is clearly in need of this small but useful helping hand. The launch of fitness footwear, the FitFlop brand in particular, has been designed to help the wearer work and firm up their leg and bottom muscles by just walking in the shoes (or boots) – nothing too strenuous but maybe just enough of a temptation to get people out and about just that little bit more and who knows, maybe the FitFlop wearers will put the toning claims to the test and wear them to the supermarket. It’s definitely a start on a very long road.

By: Nigel Linton

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