Initiatives to improve diet for various groups of consumers
CONTENTS OF THIS PAGE
1) Why fruit and vegetable consumption needs to be raised
Children
2) Changing children’s eating habits
2.1) Bribes and threats by parents
2.2) Healthier tuck shops, fizzy drinks, and vending machines
2.3) Breakfast Clubs
2.4) Food cartoon characters
2.5) School lunches, free lunches, uses of IT
2.6) Involving children in growing vegetables
2.7) Involving children in consuming vegetables
2.8) Reintroduction of cookery lessons
Adults
3)
Healthy Living Centres
4) Low
Income Project Team
5)
Health-practitioner-based interventions to improve diet
6)
Allotments and urban farms
7) Food
labelling
8) National UK Government interventions
8.1) Taxes on unhealthy foods
8.2) Banning advertising of unhealthy foods
8.3) Five a Day
8.4) Paying people to lose weight
8.5) Assisting shopkeepers to stock more fruit and vegetables
9) Food
retailers’ efforts to increase fruit and vegetable consumption
10) Possible effects of increasing demand for fresh fruit and vegetables on small local shops
1.
Why fruit and vegetable consumption needs to be raised
Increasing the demand
for fresh fruit and vegetables is a key aim. Food is of great cultural significance, and
often barriers to consumption of a healthy diet are social and cultural rather
than due to problems of access to shops selling this food. Food preferences are believed to be set early
in life (which is why companies like McDonalds make great efforts to attract
younger consumers).
McDonalds, partly in response to increasing concerns about high fat/sugar/salt foods, diet, and obesity, has begun to change its menu, decreasing some portion sizes and bringing in fruits and salads into its restaurants. However many TV adverts aimed at children promote less healthy foods. Often the food is associated with some celebrity, a TV or movie actor or a footballer or athlete. The brand names of some less healthy foods may be found on children’s games, movies Internet sites, schoolbooks, dolls, and toys (Awake, 22/4/04, p.28). By associating their high calorie food with healthy athletes and high-profile sports stars, the manufacturers of such foods can claim that increased exercise, not less calorie intake, is the key to avoiding childhood obesity. British sport received over £40 million from fast food, confectionery, and soft drinks industries (Guardian, 21/2/04, p.5), from companies such as McDonalds, Cadbury, Nestle, and Walkers. McDonalds sponsored Euro 2004 to the tune of £15 million.
It is true that for many socio-economic groups, both calorie intake and calorie usage has fallen over the years, the former falling rather less than the latter, so there may be a case for blaming obesity on less exercise. But this approach,
a) puts all the onus on reducing obesity on the consumer, bombarded with junk-food advertising,
b) ignores the health risks in junk food of non calorific substances such as excess salt, and
c) pushes the consumer down the harder path of obesity reduction.
It is harder to increase calorie output than to reduce calorie input. Many factors in wider society, from time pressures which make gym work-outs less practical) to increased labour saving devices, changing leisure habits, and a shift away from walking forced by more dispersal of homes, workplaces, and other facilities, and increasing motor traffic, have all tended to reduce calorie usage. Consumer confusion results because some supposedly ‘healthy’ foods such as sugary cereals, cereal bars, fruit snack bars, and ‘energy’ drinks are in fact high in sugar and calories. Some sugary snacks claim to be low fat, which indeed they are, but make less mention of their high sugar content.
If the children’s consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables is too low, this may be because their parents also eat too few of these foods. According to The Daily Telegraph 15/1/04, p.11, nearly 1,000,000 of the 40 million adults in the UK never eat any fruit or vegetables, and a further 3,500,000 adults eat them only once or twice a month. This was the result of a survey by the charity Cholesterol UK. A FSA Consumer Attitude Survey showed that just 28% of the UK adult population actually ate 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day, the same as in 2000. However between 2000 and 2003 the number of people believing they should eat five portions a day rose from 43% to 59% (Independent Retail News, 6/2/04, p.8). However gloomier dietary news was reported by The Times (29/11/04, p.4), which stated that “Women are now eating 2.3 portions of fruit and vegetables a day, and men eat 1.6, down from the 2002 figures of 2.9 and 2.7 portions respectively. The Daily Mail of 8/3/04, p.19, reported that ‘more than a third of children under six eat no fruit or vegetables at all’.
Unfortunately people have for some years been receiving contradictory health messages, such as cholesterol is bad for you, followed by some cholesterol is good, or oily fish is good, followed by oily fish can contain pollutants. In the face of this, some have given up listening to most health advice altogether and eat what they like – unfortunately in an environment of abundant sugary and fatty foods, this is not a good idea either. Health messages that inculcate a preference for healthy foods are more likely to succeed than possibly dictatorial ones.
2.
Changing children’s eating habits
A major initiative is underway to educate children about diet. Cookery lessons are making a comeback at secondary school level (Daily Mail, 4 September 2006, p.31). Celebrities such as Jamie Oliver have campaigned for healthier school lunches / dinners; most notably with his crusade against Turkey Twizzlers.
Efforts to persuade young people to eat more fresh fruit and vegetables may involve attempts to make such food items as fashionable as certain, less-healthy, foods like crisps and burgers in some schools. Alternatively, attempts may be made at bribery or deceit; to leave the fresh fruit and vegetables as less-desirable as before but increase consumption is spite of these preferences. The problem here is that later in life, low consumption of fresh foods may persist.
2.1.
Bribes and threats by parents
Parents may resort to devious means to get their children to ‘eat their greens’. The Yorkshire Post, p.10, 7/6/2000, reported that parents were hiding sprouts in apple pies and parsnips in the rhubarb crumble. More sophisticated methods included blending leeks into mashed potato and inserting slices of carrot in fruit cocktails. Some foods could be ‘smothered in ketchup’ (Daily Telegraph, 9/1/04, p.8). The Yorkshire Post reports that, indeed, apple pie that includes sprouts tastes awful to the mother who knows what it contains but that her child ‘wolfed it down’. Some parents paid their offspring to eat vegetables, on a per-vegetable or per-meal basis.
There are also negative rewards, i.e. threats, made by some for not eating fresh fruit and vegetables. Parents have been known to withhold pudding, access to TV programmes, and pocket money if the ‘greens aren’t eaten’. However the Yorkshire Post (p.10, 7/6/2000) also reported that 14% of parents had admitted defeat and given up on efforts to persuade their offspring to eat a more healthy diet.
2.2.
Healthier tuck shops, fizzy drinks, and vending machines
School tuck shops can stock a healthier range of foods, replacing sugary snacks, fizzy drinks, and chocolate bars with sandwiches, yoghurt, and fruit (although many yoghurts, and e.g. cereal bars, a re also rather high in sugar content). Unfortunately many schools are short of cash and “vending machines can bring in up to £15,000 a year for cash-strapped schools” (Guardian, 5/1/04, p.7), ‘who may be affected by food deserts’. It’s not hard to guess which companies manufacturing what sort of snacks have the most cash to give to schools in return for giving space to vending machines selling those company’s snacks.
A 330 ml can of fizzy drink typically contains 150 calories. This may not seem a lot (it is not far short of 10% of daily adult energy needs for an adult female) , but consumption of 150 excess calories a day over a 10-year period can result in weight gain of 50kg, or 7.9 stone. Fizzy drinks also make work for dentists. Some schools have obtained extracted human teeth from dentists and then put them in a glass of fizzy pop – the kids love watching the tooth go black and rotten within two weeks.
However vending machines can also be used to sell healthier snacks, such as pieces of fruit, or fruit juice instead of popular fizzy drinks (although many fruit juices are high in sugar). The school may get less income from its vending machine but pupil behaviour may improve and targets on things like truancy be met more easily.
Five-A-Day Norfolk, an initiative hosted by North Norfolk Primary care Trust and accessible at www.fiveadaynorfolk.org, details successful local-school-based initiatives in the Norfolk area.
2.3.
Breakfast Clubs
Breakfast clubs may be useful at schools in schools in poor areas, because many pupils, even in the UK in 2003, still go to school most days without eating breakfast, due to poverty at home. Breakfast clubs can be used to instil healthy eating habits in the very children who are least likely to have a healthy diet at home.
2.4.
Food cartoon characters
In the USA in the 1930s, the ‘Popeye’ campaign raised spinach consumption amongst the nations’ youth. Today (2003) in the UK, campaigns such as ‘Food Dudes’ aim to make it ‘cool’ to eat vegetables at school, and alter the existing school culture where crisps and chips are the ‘in’ foods. Schoolchildren in the Stoke on Trent and Leeds areas were recently greeted by a giant carrot called ‘Chris P Carrot’ (Big Issue in the North, 2/2/04, p.5). This was organised by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and was aimed both at promoting vegetarianism and reducing obesity.
2.5.
School lunches, free lunches, uses of IT
School canteens may also be able to use information technology to shift pupil’s eating habits towards a more healthy diet. Some schools (2008) use electronic cards, not cash, for pupils to pay for their school lunches. The card system has a number of advantages. Pupils have no money to lose, to be forced to give to bullies, or to spend on crisps and sweets in town. Pupils on free school lunches cannot be so easily identified by their peers and stigmatised or bullied. And parents can obtain a report stating what diet their child had eaten, and bar them from getting foods such as cream cakes.
Another option is to make all schoolchildren eligible for free school meals; the cost should be recouped in later years in the form of lower healthcare costs. Some 40% of eligible children do not take up free school meals (2008), due it is believed to bullying and stigmatisation.
2.6.
Involving children in growing vegetables
Local community centres may be able to set up allotments and encourage local families to grow food on them. Gardening tools and seeds may have to be provided, and so funding will be a major problem. However if children help in the allotment work, they are often encourage to also try out the taste of the vegetables they have helped to cultivate. This may also provide valuable biology lessons for school. Schools can also educate children about the food chain, from farm to plate, giving advice on healthy eating along the way. It has also been suggested that involving young children at home with helping mother (or father) cook the dinner can help them with things like maths and cognitive / spatial /organisational skills.
2.7.
Involving children in consuming vegetables
Even earlier in a child’s life, research has shown that seeing their mother eating vegetables can encourage a child to develop a taste for them. Eating meals together as a family, rather than shift-eating of microwave TV meals, may also encourage children to eat more fruit and vegetables (Daily Mail, 8/3/04, p.19). Fruits can be made more palatable by making them into ‘smoothies’, by use of a liquidiser. Earlier still, babies who are breast-fed may detect flavour molecules from vegetables eaten by the mother, priming them to like these also (Daily Telegraph, 8/10/2003, p.16).
2.8.
Reintroduction of cookery lessons
In 2008 the UK government announced that cookery lessons were to become compulsory for pupils aged 11 – 14. School cookery lessons were largely abandoned in the 1980s. Children then may still have got healthy food at home as their parents knew how to cook, but those 1980s children are now the parents in 2008 and there is a whole cohort of families where neither the parents nor the children have much idea of how to prepare healthy food. The cookery lessons will be held from 2011.
3.
Healthy Living Centres
Healthy Living Centres have been set up in a number of poor areas, such as the St Augustine’s Centre on the North Lynn estate, Kings Lynn, or the West Leeds Healthy Living Network in Armley, Leeds. They encourage various community activities such as breakfast clubs, crèches, fitness activities, and community cafes. Jobs training and skills may be provided, and there may be a regular visit by a GP or a benefits advisor. Improving people’s diet, encouraging them to cook more and even grow their own fruit and vegetables, is part of a wider package aimed at encouraging healthier lifestyles. In a sense they carry on a tradition began in the Boer War, when recruits were found to be in poor health (Guardian II, 25/7/01, p.5). Mothers in the east End of London needed cooking lessons, and middle class volunteers, or ‘pudding ladies’, went there to give these.
4.
Low Income Project Team
The Low Income Project team called for more production of vegetables on allotments, and suggested the unemployed might be encouraged to produce a surplus to sell if the income from this was exempted from deductions against Benefit. However the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) might object on two grounds, Firstly, this would effectively add to their payouts, at a timer when government departments are under pressure to cut spending. More fundamentally the DWP might fear a type of ‘income laundering’ here as it would become difficult to prove what income an unemployed person was deriving from informal vegetable sales and what they might be getting from undeclared other sources. This suggestion is unlikely to come about so long as the DWP’s main aim is benefit savings.
5. Health-practitioner-based
interventions to improve diet
Doctors in The Wirral, Merseyside, are giving their patients £6 a week vouchers to use at the local Co-op to buy fresh, tinned, frozen, or dried fruit and vegetables. The vouchers are given for up to ten weeks (Guardian, 1/8/01, p.9). The scheme appears to work, as patients actually spend several times more than this £6 a week on fruit and vegetables, from a level of little or no consumption before. The NHS recoups the cost in reduced medical costs. From end-2004 the UK government is to introduce a voucher scheme for poorer families to encourage them to buy fruit and vegetables (Guardian 17/2/04, p.7). Around 800,000 families will benefit. Families with children over one year old will get vouchers worth £2.80 a week; families with children under one will get £5.60 a week
In Scunthorpe the hospital has an outreach programme for Crosby, an area where many poor and south Asian families live. This promotes the use of allotments and teaches cooking skills.
6.
Allotments and urban farms
See http://www.allotment.org.uk/articles/Allotment-History.php
Allotments in their modern form in the UK largely date from the passing of the Small Holdings and Allotments Act in 1908, which was followed by a large increase in the number of allotments being cultivated. On 31 December 1909 there were 58, 648 allotments in England and Wales, covering a total of 17,529 acres (this figure includes paths and sheds), and by 31 December 1914 this figure had increased to 130,526 allotments on 33,523 acres (1 acre = 4840 square yards = 0.4 hectares). The outbreak of World War One, with consequent restrictions on food imports to the UK, resulted in emergency legislation being passed by the UK government to enable local authorities to requisition land for use as allotments. The number of allotments rose sharply, and the peak was reached in 1920 when England and Wales had 1,330,000 allotments on 185,000 acres (Encyclopaedia Britannica 1960 edition, Vol.1, pp.660-1). By 1931, the number of allotments had fallen to 608,286, and to 589,015 by 1937; however these last two figures are for urban areas only and do not include some 80,000 ‘railway allotments’. However the increase in unemployment in the 1930s Depression raised demand for allotments up till 1934, but many were used for new housing after that date. In the inter-War years, councils were permitted by law to plan urban allotments, allowing space for them in town plans, and to incur a loss in their provision of up to 1d in every £1 of rates income (240 old pennies = £1). Not all councils used these powers at this time, contributing to a late-1930s decline in allotments.
World War Two also raised allotment use, with the slogan “Dig For Victory”, and by 1944 there were some 1,750,000 allotments in England and Wales. Britons were also being fed by the efforts of 5,000,000 private gardeners growing food. It was estimated that a 300 square yard allotments could supply all the vegetables for a family of three.
Pressure came on allotments as more land was demanded for housing. This was not due so much to a rise in the total UK population (which by world standards has been very slow-growing), but from a rise in single-person households, and from more households wanting a house with a garden rather than a terraced house or flat. The average rent for an allotment, of 300 square yards, is £20 to £40, per year (2008). One or two allotments can easily provide enough land for a 4-bedroom house, which will likely sell for at least £250,000, even in the north of England (and several times this in London). Not only can the council sell the land to a house builder, it will then receive a steady stream of council tax, at perhaps £1,500 a year, from the house. Financially it is no contest, and even by 1970 the number of allotments in the UK was down to 500,000. By 1997 the UK had just 297,000 allotments. However an interest in organic food, rising food prices, and several TV programmes promoting home-grown food, has slowed or even halted this decline.
However urban farming goes back a lot further than 1908, and is still in use in the early twenty first century as a valuable source of food, leisure, and a way of improving people’s diet. Most cities of ancient civilisations, such as Ur and Eridu in Sumeria, or the ancient cities of China, had ample space inside their walls for intensive vegetable cultivation, useful in times of siege. Mediaeval European cities also commonly had vegetable gardens within their city walls. Tokyo today has land laws giving protection to farmers, with the result that land use there is actually rather inefficient from some points of view, with valuable urban land being given over to rice paddies. This raises domestic land prices, exacerbates overcrowding, and extends commuting distances. However some urban farming is a great asset to the economy, the local ecology, and the urban inhabitants.
With the depopulation of UK city centres and the flight of residents to greener housing in the suburbs as the centre gave way to intensive commercial use, British urban farming declined over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However the deindustrialisation of the 1970s onwards released large areas of land that sat derelict, allowing community projects such as urban farms some space. Town and Country Planning, Vol.57, 1988pp.109-111, described the ‘Ashram Acres’ project in Sparkbrook, in the inner south-east suburbs of Birmingham. Local migrant residents had brought farming skills from their villages of origin in India, Pakistan, the Caribbean, and Ireland, and volunteer labour was provided by them to convert wasteland into agricultural land. With a membership subscription, local labour, and sales of produce, Ashram Acres was self-sustaining, needing no external grant funding. Livestock provided manure as well as more income, and solar panels were used on greenhouses for heating.
Similarly in 2004 London managed to produce 16,000 tons of vegetables annually (The Times Review, Saturday 28/8/04, p.24). Around the world, a third of urban households are growing food, for home consumption or for sale, many in Third World cities such as in Cuba, Kenya and Tanzania. Besides financial benefits, there are psychological benefits too. Gardening, growing plants, can be relaxing, and involving children may persuade them to eat more vegetables; adult diets may also improve. And the plants are aesthetically attractive too. Many households have grown vegetables even without a ‘garden’ as such, using rooftop cultivation or even growing plants in pots on flat balconies or in hanging baskets.
In 2009, as families feel the Credit Crunch, demand for allotments is rising. Households have been squeezed by rising food prices and other costs, whilst some have lost their jobs and need to economise. Growing food is a good way to save money whilst also getting exercise and relaxing, and getting food without added pesticides and other residues. All sorts of land can and is being made available for allotments, from old railway land, and canal banks to grounds in stately homes.
Demand for allotments exceeds supply, and London lost many allotments to the 2012 Olympic site. Here, in a few years time, millions of allotment-less couch potatoes, along with those waiting for an allotment, will be able to watch a few super-fit people running on the site of former Stratford allotments; whilst they laze on a sofa in front of the TV eating microwave ready-meals.
7.
Food labelling
The public is being given more information on the calorific content of foods. Most foods now state how many calories they contain, and there are schemes for information on salt, fat, sugar, and other dietary composition information too. Tesco and the Food and Drink Federation are amongst the supporters of the RDS (Recommended Daily Allowance) system, under which foods state how much of the RDA for e.g. sugar they contain. Unfortunately this system may give misleading information if, e.g. too small a portion is used for the analysis – making the food appear more healthy than it is, when in fact most people will eat a larger size. The Food Standards Agency and several rival supermarkets to Tesco favour the Traffic Lights scheme, under which a food gets red, amber, or green, according to how low its levels of fat, sugar, and salt are.
However the Traffic Light System may make marmite and cheese (good sources of vitamins and calcium) seem less healthy than diet coke. The FSA uses a standard 100 gram portion, which again gives misleading results when foods like marmite or cheese are graded, because most people not eat as much as100g of cheese at once (30g is more typical). Marmite scores very badly, as 100g would be extremely high in salt, but no-one eats this much at one sitting. Meanwhile diet coke comes out as healthy, because of its low levels of fat, salt, and sugar, despite its containing artificial sweeteners and colours.
A system from the USA may be the solution – star ratings for foods, the healthier foods get more stars. Psychologically this may be a better system, as people respond better to positive messages about food than to being cajoled to eat less of unhealthy foods.
8.
National UK Government interventions
Governments might like to take decisive action to improve national diet. The main obstacle here is the limited, five-year lifespan of an elected British government. Changing people’s diet is a slow process, and the medical benefits from this change would take still longer to show through. No government will spend billions of pounds on measures whose benefits will likely accrue to the next government after the one to replace it. However taxes on unhealthy foods bring in immediate revenue and so are more attractive.
8.1. Taxes
on unhealthy foods
Governments often impose taxes on goods and services whose price does not reflect the full cost to society of consuming that good or service. These taxes are called Pigouvian Taxes, after the economist Arthur Pigou, who first proposed these taxes. For example we tax cigarettes, because cigarettes cause lung cancer, the treatment of which is likely to fall on the NHS, because sickness from cigarette smoking causes losses to society when the smoker is off work, and not least because secondary smoking causes further illness in people who did not even buy the cigarettes. The effect of cigarette smoke on non-smokers is an example of en externality, an economic cost (or sometimes a benefit) that is not accounted for in the price of a good. Likewise we impose environmental taxes on e.g. petrol for cars, because the noise and pollution caused by cars is an externality, it is not accounted for in the price of petrol, because this externality doe snot fall on the car driver or the petrol supplier.
Just as we tax tobacco and alcohol, more heavily, a ‘fat tax’ on unhealthy foods has been proposed. In Austria, it was proposed that people with a high BMI (Body Mass Index) should pay more social insurance, although many muscular rugby players also have a high BMI, which simply measures the ratio between height and weight. In the USA, New York State has proposed an extra sales tax on soft drinks (Financial Times, 16/12/08, p.21). Similar proposals in the UK include higher taxes on foods high in sugar. In 2009 the US revived the idea, to curb the increase in obesity amongst teenagers; there was predictable opposition from the large US soft drinks industry. A 3% tax on sugary soft drinks would be used to fund health initiatives.
However this would be regressive, bearing down more on the poor than the rich, because the poor tend to eat more sugary, fatty, foods. Yet the higher tobacco tax is also regressive, because the poor tend to smoke more, and this is deemed acceptable. UK Doctors have called for an extension of VAT to high fat foods (Daily Telegraph, 10 June 2003, p.8). Most food is now exempt from VAT so the Treasury would gain considerably. Full implementation of a high tax system to healthy / unhealthy foods may prove problematical, as there would be classification problems with borderline foods. Also, some less-healthy foodstuffs such as diet coke might escape whilst, say, honey or marmite was taxed, making consumption of some healthy foods more expensive.
The case for a tax on fatty foods is less clear because the externalities are less certain. It is not consumption of fatty foods alone that causes obesity, but lack of exercise as well. And it is hard to pin down the exact health costs caused by obesity, in the way that lung cancer can be attributed to cigarettes, because the diseases of obesity – heart disease, cancer, diabetes – can have other causes. And a ‘fat tax’ might actually increase obesity, if it pushes people into buying healthier foods that take longer to prepare, because the amount of time given to exercise might then be reduced. The behavioural consequences of taxes need carefully thinking through.
Perhaps a ‘fat tax’ is more acceptable if it targets unhealthy foods that are avoidable, such as fizzy drinks, whilst leaving aside the foods poor people may have to eat (because there is little healthy, fresh, food accessible to them), such as ready meals and takeaways.
In April 2010 Romania became the first country in the world to announce plans to implement a tax on unhealthy food. However implementation has been delayed due to problems of defining just what foods are ‘unhealthy’. Romanian street vendors selling kebabs with fresh meat complained they would be hit, but their food was in fact healthy. In other countries, Norway taxes sugar and chocolate, and the USA has proposed a tax on junk food and sweetened drinks. In 2008 France proposed a higher VAT rate on foods high in sugar and salt but never actually applied this.
See ‘The Economist’, 1 August 2009, p.67
8.2.
Banning advertising of unhealthy foods
A ban on advertising unhealthy foods has also been considered from time to time. This would follow the same logic as banning cigarette advertising, and the heavy restrictions on alcohol advertising within the EU. Campaigners want to ban such foods from being advertised before 9pm, to protect children.
8.3 Five
a Day
In 1997 the UK New Labour Government recommended that people eat ‘five portions (of fruit and/or vegetables) a day’. In theory this was very simple to understand and adopt. However this very simplicity led to some misunderstandings. Some people thought they were being told to eat five portions of fruit and five portions of vegetables a day (they weren’t). Others were not sure if potatoes or chips counted, or herbs, or fruit juice or fruit flavoured yoghurts. There was some dispute as to what counted as a ‘portion’ – did a single grape count, or was an entire grapefruit just one ‘portion’ (a portion is roughly one handful, potatoes don’t count, fruit juice does, but yoghurts with no fruit content don’t). Five-a-day sits well with the concept of food rainbows, whereby people are urged to consumer different colours of fruit and vegetables. For example they may eat one red (Strawberry portion), an orange, a banana, a green vegetable, and a portion of a blue/purple food such as a beetroot or blackcurrants.
In practice the average UK consumer, in 2008, only managed 2.5 portions a day, up marginally on the 2.4 average for 2005 (The Grocer, 12/7/2008, p.59). Whilst the wealthiest ate the most fruit and vegetables, 1.9 million less-well-off consumers ate less than 1 portion per day. Women ate more portions than men, and young persons ate less portions than older people. In the 17-24 age group, men ate 1.8 portions a day, and women ate 2.0. Only 12% of UK consumers achieved the full 5 a day. The Grocer stated that this data was based on actual consumption, not on sales data which had suggested average UK consumption of 3.5 portions a day.
However the magic ‘5’ in Five a Day is based more on convenience and easy memorability than a strict biological necessity. Other countires have different recommendations, as the examples below show.
FVV = Fresh Fruit and Vegetables
Sweden – eat FFV with every meal
Denmark – 6 FFV a day
Netherlands – 4 FFV a day
Germany – 5 FFV a day
Hungary – 3 FFV a day
Australia – 2 fruit and 5 vegetables a day
New Zealand – 5 FFV a day
Canada – between 5 and 10 FFV a day
USA – between 5 and 9 FFV a day
8.4. Paying people to lose weight
The UK government has considered (January 2008) the idea of paying overweight people to slim down, either in cash or with food vouchers (for healthy foods like fruit of course). Employers may also be willing to pay, if this reduces time off for illness (Guardian 24/1/2008, p.10). Private companies such as General Electric (USA) or Weight Wins (UK) also pay employees / clients who shed the lard.
These financial incentives are part of a range of NHS payments to patients who, for example, agree to stop smoking of have a Chlamydia test.
8.5)
Assisting shopkeepers to stock more fruit and vegetables
The UK government has trialled a scheme in deprived areas of north-east England to persuade mall shopkeepers to stock more healthy foods (Guardian, 13 August 2008, p.7, Marketing Week 300/7/2009, p.8), under the slogan ‘Change4Life’.. Shops can apply for grants to buy shelving, chiller cabinets, and advertising material promoting fruit and vegetable consumption. By May 2009, it was hoped that 120 stores will have signed up to the scheme; in fact 88 had joined by July 2009. A similar scheme already trialled in Scotland saw participating shopkeeper’s profits rise by 20% or more.
9.
Food retailers’ efforts to increase fruit and vegetable consumption
Asda “is to place fresh fruit instead of confectionery at checkouts to help parents resist the demands of children and tackle Britain’s obesity crisis” – Guardian, 5/12/03, p.5.
Aston University catering has a ‘Fresh Fruit Fortnight’, offering fresh fruit items for 20p
(2008).
MacDonald’s is to sell fruit and vegetables with its meals
Waitrose, 2003, has a leaflet entitled ‘Food Explorers’, aimed at encouraging children tom eat a variety of fruit, vegetables, dairy products, and low fat, sugar, and salt ‘treats’.
Walls is to launch ‘diet’ versions of popular brands such as Magnum and Carte d’Or, amidst growing concerns over child obesity (Daily Mail, 22/1/04, p.35). Many parents have stopped their children eating ice cream because of obesity fears, so the move makes commercial sense. Diet magnum will contain 11.7% fat as opposed to 17% fat in the original, and fat levels in Carte d’Or will fall from 55 to under 2.5%. However ice cream can also be high in sugar.
10.
Possible effects of increasing demand for fresh fruit and vegetables on small
local shops
Persuading people to improve their diet by eating more fruit and vegetables, preferably but not necessarily fresh fruit and vegetables, is a key health aim. But will it improve the trade and viability of small local grocery stores? It might, since these food items do not last long, even if refrigerated, and so need to be purchased fairly frequently. In areas where many households lack cooking skills, local shops do not stock many fresh fruit and vegetables because of lack of demand, and they are not demanded because being locally unavailable (for those without cars), there is little incentive to gain the cooking skills needed to prepare them. Improving cooking skills through local adult education and child persuasion might break this vicious circle.
However such food items are bulky and heavy, and where household demand for them is raised, they may simply visit a local supermarket more often. This could erode the number of ‘top-up’ visits to local grocery stores and so actually reduce their trade. If some of these local shops then closed, access to food could ultimately be reduced for some households through a health-based food education initiative. Along with raising fresh fruit and vegetable consumption, there probably needs to be some initiative to support local grocery retailing, though the support that can be given is severely constrained by competition rules and governance factors such as the shortage of money available from central government and so, especially, from local government.