Nah, poverty generally causes shit food and significant evidence to show this - lack of access to better food, expensive local shops with poor choice, poor education re choices, and peer/family pressure. Leads to poorer health and people trapped in crap housing, unemployment/crap jobs, which is then effectively passed on to their kids. Cycle of poverty. That’s why the majority of malnourished (can be over or underweight) people I see are from deprived areas. It would be an oversimplification to think that giving people better food would take them out of poverty - multi factorial issues. Oh, and we still regularly see Irn Bru in baby bottles in West of Scotland - missing front teeth and high rates of full ‘baby teeth’ extractions under general anaesthetic.
Food has never been so cheap, even expensive food, and our grandparents (for example), spent far more on food than we did, plus the food available was very limited, and your average Lidl veg isle would no doubt appear like the garden of the Gods! They didn't have was processed food or decades of false marketing from experts on a low fat, high carb diet, something we'll look back on as a form of institutional genocide (how public health is corrupted by the market). The effect of feeding children bowls of sugar for breakfast, then sending them to school to learn, should be viewed as a crime, as kids hooked on sugar cannot learn anything, but only 'diagnosed' as having some disorder that requires another drug. If you look at the better outcomes of East Asian and African kids in UK education, and then later in life (making 15% more than average), how much of that better 'culture' is a culture based around a traditional diet? If you have an attention economy (TV, internet, phones, games), then faster food allows you to spend more time paying attention to other things, while a slow diet, the need to weight and measure, to understand ingredients, the price of food, its value and merit, how some food (the best food) goes off, and some lasts, the process of cooking, and the discipline and mastery of it, is something that has a deeper meaning than just nutrition. Someone who can bake a cake has more chance at learning to code or build a complex machine than someone who thinks food comes in a box. But food isn't the only reason for poverty, depression, violence, despair, suicide, but it a very big part of it that we fail to see (because there's too much money riding on it).
Hmmmm... whilst I agree with some of what you say, there’s a difference between causation and correlation and you are linking diet to academic achievement without considering any other factor. I would also suggest that the swinging of the pendulum the other way (promotion of low-carb, high fat diet) to see equally as damaging as I would expect the associated levels of strokes and cardiovascular disease increase accordingly (and there is a causative link). Where will the loud voices that advocate extremes of diet be in 20-30 years? Strangely quiet or already pushing the next food fad. What the current dietary recommendations actually say is somewhere in the middle - but that’s not exciting enough and you can’t sell it (do you see a trend yet?). Furthermore, human behaviour is such that you can show people what they should be doing - but they probably won’t do it. Eg, no one in healthcare advocates a high sugar breakfast cereal but that’s what people eat (horse/water). Remember, commercial advertising budgets are likely higher than our public health allocations and government could do better to curb inappropriate advertising - but then you of all people Andy, might see that as censorship and restriction of choice by the nanny state? ;-) So, yes, it’s bad that people have poor diets, but to suggest that the actual, evidence-based recommendations are incorrect is ... er ... incorrect.
Nah, poverty generally causes shit food and significant evidence to show this - lack of access to better food, expensive local shops with poor choice, poor education re choices, and peer/family pressure. Leads to poorer health and people trapped in crap housing, unemployment/crap jobs, which is then effectively passed on to their kids. Cycle of poverty. That’s why the majority of malnourished (can be over or underweight) people I see are from deprived areas. It would be an oversimplification to think that giving people better food would take them out of poverty - multi factorial issues. Oh, and we still regularly see Irn Bru in baby bottles in West of Scotland - missing front teeth and high rates of full ‘baby teeth’ extractions under general anaesthetic.
Food has never been so cheap, even expensive food, and our grandparents (for example), spent far more on food than we did, plus the food available was very limited, and your average Lidl veg isle would no doubt appear like the garden of the Gods! They didn't have was processed food or decades of false marketing from experts on a low fat, high carb diet, something we'll look back on as a form of institutional genocide (how public health is corrupted by the market). The effect of feeding children bowls of sugar for breakfast, then sending them to school to learn, should be viewed as a crime, as kids hooked on sugar cannot learn anything, but only 'diagnosed' as having some disorder that requires another drug. If you look at the better outcomes of East Asian and African kids in UK education, and then later in life (making 15% more than average), how much of that better 'culture' is a culture based around a traditional diet? If you have an attention economy (TV, internet, phones, games), then faster food allows you to spend more time paying attention to other things, while a slow diet, the need to weight and measure, to understand ingredients, the price of food, its value and merit, how some food (the best food) goes off, and some lasts, the process of cooking, and the discipline and mastery of it, is something that has a deeper meaning than just nutrition. Someone who can bake a cake has more chance at learning to code or build a complex machine than someone who thinks food comes in a box. But food isn't the only reason for poverty, depression, violence, despair, suicide, but it a very big part of it that we fail to see (because there's too much money riding on it).
Hmmmm... whilst I agree with some of what you say, there’s a difference between causation and correlation and you are linking diet to academic achievement without considering any other factor. I would also suggest that the swinging of the pendulum the other way (promotion of low-carb, high fat diet) to see equally as damaging as I would expect the associated levels of strokes and cardiovascular disease increase accordingly (and there is a causative link). Where will the loud voices that advocate extremes of diet be in 20-30 years? Strangely quiet or already pushing the next food fad. What the current dietary recommendations actually say is somewhere in the middle - but that’s not exciting enough and you can’t sell it (do you see a trend yet?). Furthermore, human behaviour is such that you can show people what they should be doing - but they probably won’t do it. Eg, no one in healthcare advocates a high sugar breakfast cereal but that’s what people eat (horse/water). Remember, commercial advertising budgets are likely higher than our public health allocations and government could do better to curb inappropriate advertising - but then you of all people Andy, might see that as censorship and restriction of choice by the nanny state? ;-) So, yes, it’s bad that people have poor diets, but to suggest that the actual, evidence-based recommendations are incorrect is ... er ... incorrect.