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All this nagging, Nicola, isn’t making us thin
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Nicola Roxon thinks were too fat, smoke too much and drink too much. And all of this overindulgence is costing the country a motza. But don’t worry she’s got a solution. She’s going to nag us to death instead. This week she announced she’s creating the National Preventative Health Agency (NPHA). This brand spanking new, taxpayer funded thingo will ”push, cajole and lead” families, schools, workplaces, industries, clubs and community organisations to encourage healthier living. You don’t have to exercise too much imagination to understand what that’s going to look like. Get ready to be told you need to exercise more, eat less fat, stop smoking and stop drinking. Nicola’s health taskforce has observed that the stuff we’ve been told to do for 30 years isn’t working, and their solution is, ah, to do more of it? Its timely then, that just last week, the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne published the results of a study into exactly how effective that kind of nagging is. The research team asked 66 general practitioners to administer advice “targeting change in nutrition, physical activity, and sedentary behaviour.” The advice was in accordance with the national healthy living guidelines, exactly the same guidelines that Nicola plans to “cajole” us with. In the study, 258 obese Melbourne children were randomly assigned to either an intervention or a control group. The children in the intervention group saw their GP four times over a 12 week period and received all the recommended advice about nutrition and exercise. The kids in the control group lived life as normal without any nagging from their doctor. Twelve months later, the researchers checked in with the kids to see what difference it made. The result was that the counselling “did not improve BMI, physical activity, or nutrition in overweight or mildly obese 5-10 year olds.” The researchers went on to note that “and it would be very costly if universally implemented.” Details are a bit light on at the moment, but I don’t think Nicola is planning to have our doctors nag us once a month. Even if she did, this study suggests the outcome would be exactly the same as doing nothing. And doing nothing sounds like it might be quite a bit cheaper. Our standard health advice might be firing blanks but elsewhere in the world, similar studies with slightly different advice have achieved significantly more impressive outcomes. In the UK, 644 schoolchildren were divided into two groups. One group was told they would be healthier if they stopped drinking sugar (in the form of soft drinks) and the control group was not told that. The message was delivered in four one hour lessons (one per term) during a school year. The group of kids who weren’t told about sugar got fatter. By the end of the school year, there were 7.5 percent more overweight and obese kids in that group than there were at the start. But in the other group there were slightly less (.2 percent) fat kids. No one was forcing the children to stop drinking sugar and they didn’t entirely stop. They just slightly reduced the amount they drank on average. The UK study was done in 2001 and adds to the pile of over 80 studies which say that if we drink less sugar we lose weight. This kind of evidence seems to have escaped the mighty deductive powers of our health hierarchy. Because even in the face of unequivocal proof that the advice we give our children doesn’t work, we’re lining up for more of the same. Nicola, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. It doesn’t matter how often you nag us about exercising more and eating less fat or how many quangos you create to do it. The advice is wrong and it won’t get more right by saying it more often. It’s time to start paying attention to what the science really says rather than what Big Sugar would like us to believe it says. |
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8 Comments
Simple solution- tax the hell out of Petrol so that parents stop driving themselves and the kids everywhere and they have to walk, cycle or at least walk to the bus or train stop.
I seriously doubt there is more energy going into these kids then previous generations- they just aren’t “applying” that energy to anything but sitting around playing games and staying safe indoors.
Parents are coddling children to the point of physically and psychologically harming them and shows like Today Tonight, Current Affair and their ilk which try and make parents fearful of letting children do anything that could possibly make them break a sweat is appalling.
Billions of people on earth liv and get around using those funny silts attached to our hips, they are called legs and the car is a dinosaur we seem to think we can’t live without. Truth be told, we can’t live with it if we want to ah… survive with any sort of health or future for those darling children we want to cosset in airbags an a 4WD chassis.
Petrol running out, climate getting hotter, children getting fatter. Join the dots.
The government has bought into the rationalist argument that obesity, smoking etc are ‘knowledge deficit disorders’. Possibly this is because it looks effective - afterall there are all those ads and posters - without any chance that it will actually damage commercial intersts. It goes against evidence that peoples decisions are influenced by their environment and that, if you saturate people with junk food advertising for example, they will not act in their rational self interest. I hope, but don’t expect, the NHPA will have a broader understanding of health promotion than the social marketing credo of “Make a flashy scare ad” ad hope people change.
It is infinitely depressing to realize that Canberra has so much of our money that they-the people who mind the politicians -have to scrape ever deeper into the think- bin to come up with ways to use taxpayers money.
The police from the departments of Political Correctness have, like the sorcerer’s
apprentice, multiplied by quantum leaps. There’s a whole new branch of this department now devoted to the latest idiocy of Home-Birthing. NO I AM NOT anti-Home Birthing, by I am against the pious platitudes of the recent converts.
You make a good case for reducing sugar intake as a means to controlling weight gain, but there is no doubt that the right kind of education, propaganda or whatever does work - witness the reduction in tobacco use.
I imagine that you have to get the parents on side if you wish to attack the consumption of excessive amounts of soft drink, and also attack the insidious advertisement of Coke, Pepsi etc.
Society is so much more affluent these days than when children’s parents and grandparents where young; then a soft drink would be a reward or occasional treat maybe once or twice a week. Now it appears to a standard part of the diet.
This has got nothing to do with actually improving people’s health or anything like that, its to do with governments spending a fortune on government ads to give us the impression they are ‘doing something’
This seemed to start with the Howard government, with the stupid ‘be alert be alarmed’ ads, which were really there to give the impression they were doing something for us.
Now we are bombarded on TV and on websites with endless pointless ads from State and Federal governments, telling us how great they are, and not to smoke and drink, and exercise, and to re-elect them, and that the internet is dangerous.
I think its basically an admission from these governments that its just too hard to enact meaningful reforms (that might cost money) so papering everything in glossy PR bullshit is a lot easier.
It really is extremely insulting to the average voter to be forced to pay to be lied to.
Adam Gilbert (1.42pm): “I seriously doubt there is more energy going into these kids then previous generations”. That is a pretty strange statement. The availability and consumption and size of average soft drinks is huge today, not to mention a wide variety of other snack food (chips, chocolate bars, biscuits that are more like chocolate bars, sugar-laden breakfast cereals, ice-cream etc) that once were a rare treat are now much more common. American portion size (gigantic) has been adopted in the fast-food industry and the snack food industry.
There are two main things which could help the problem: (1) get kids to walk to and from school every day and (2) reduce sugared water consumption.
The first is incredibly difficult especially with the paranoia about the dangers facing children today. Incidentally this is not a simplistic matter of calories burned by walking (studies show that exercise per se does not reverse weight gain, eg. fat people who go to a gym regularly do not lose more weight than those who do not, in fact they tend to gain a bit more!) but a cultural thing. If people never walk anywhere as kids they will grow up with an aversion to it. Taxing petrol is not going to work. It would need changes in our total urban planning and infrastructure combined with a minor social revolution. I cannot see it happening. We are too dumb, just like most Americans.
The second is feasibly approachable through both education and legislation on softdrinks. In supermarkets the ratio of diet to regular drinks is at least 1:4. Drastic and anti-libertarian though it may seem it could be legislated to enforce a more equal representation in supermarkets and fast-food outlets (where likewise there is usually only a single type of diet drink available and often I have found that “that fountain is not working today”). Or that every single drink type must be available side-by-side in the diet form. Alternatively legislate maximum sugar levels in drinks which would force the increasing use of sweeteners. After all kids couldn’t care less about where the sweetness comes from.
First, if Nicola Roxon was a bloke, would he be accused of “nagging”? Second,, the fact is that the majority of citizens in developed and prosperous countries are either overweight or obese. Third, this is costing us lots of money and will cost us more in the future. When this is coupled with an ageing population, and the recent reports re the numbers of people who will develop Alzheimer’s disease, I’m surprised that people aren’t taking it more seriously. It’ll be your taxes that go into these areas, with less left over for other important and essential necessities! For example, the Fed govt receives about $6 billion in tobacco taxes, but the diseases caused by smoking cigarettes costs about $23 billion per yr.(I stand corrected on this figure, but there is a big gap.)
Many parents where both are working outside the home take kids to school for example, as it’s the quickest and safest solution in many cases. Some take kids to pre-school and school, and in many cases they’re big distances apart - a good policy that Rudd took to the election, was to have child care centres on the same site as primary schools - what a common sense idea! Some areas have solved the problem by having older, retired people or umnemployed or?? do ‘school walk duties’. A human ‘bus’ (several to cover the main routes - people with police checks etc)picks kids up on the way and walks them to & from school, except when weather is lousy! Everyone wins!
I say get rid of junk food advertising during kids viewing time, and put a higher tax on goods with sugar and fat content that’s too high! Perhaps better education about food and menus etc before and after kids are born. Some people just don’t know - if you weren’t taught, then you can’t educate your kids. Some schools have gardens and grow food, that kids care for, harvest, cook and eat - this has changed many kids attitudes to food, and they in turn teach their parents too! The whole family is involved in this activity. I think it’s great! A high school up north even had a couple of calves for a short while to teach kids about agriculture etc. There are many avenues to incorporate good food habits, and I don’t think Nicola Roxon is a ‘nagger’ as the bottom line is - when we stuff ourselves with wrong food or too much food, we stuff the country up too!
A ‘nagger’ is just a word for someone who has to keep repeating the same message, because people won’t listen or they’re too stupid to take notice the first (few) time/s!
I don’t know David, cajoling people to develop good habits is much of what Government does. As a policy tool shiny-bums like me know it as ‘light touch regulation’ and it’s used in many settings some times effectively sometimes, less so. You agree that information can have a beneficial effect but we don’t know what a new independent health promotion agency might say, do we? I’d rather wait and see what sort of advice the new NPHA provides rather than speculatively Sh#tcanning it.
Venise, I’m not having a go but a quantum leap is the smallest possible leap a thing (electron I believe) can make not the biggest.