We need to be doing something about our eating habits: they’re pretty damaging to both us and the wider world.
Because, after all, “eating more than we need is wasteful and bad for the planet” as a local commentator reminds us.
Here are some excerpts from an excellent recent piece from the Telegraph:
We have become a nation of overeaters. Adults in the UK are consuming up to 50 per cent more calories than they realise, according to a 2018 study by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Men were found to be putting away 1,000 extra calories per day, while women took on 800 more than they thought.
“There is no scientific backing for the claim that somehow we simply lost our willpower in the past five decades,” says Steve Hendricks, author of The Oldest Cure in the World: Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting.
The best theory with some scientific support, he says, is that we’ve become fatter than we were because we’re doing exactly what evolution designed us to do, “which is to seek out the most calorically dense food, which is the tastiest”.
A time of abundance
Long gone are the days of spending all our time searching for our scran. Food has become increasingly available, from coffee shops and meal-delivery apps to petrol stations and vending machines. Rather than preparing our own food at home, from scratch, using ingredients that we understand, we can now buy food anytime, anywhere.
In the 1950s, Britons spent a third of their income on food shopping, but in 1974 this had gone down to 24 per cent. By 2016, food shopping accounted for just 10.5 per cent of our spending.
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Our grandparents and their parents before them wouldn’t have been familiar with a new eating behaviour: snacking. Over the past 40 years, this has gone from something entirely frowned-upon to a normalised part of daily eating.
“The idea has taken hold, largely food-industry driven, that we need to be constantly eating something or we might become weak or depleted (or even hypoglycaemic) – which, of course, never happened to our grandparents, who didn’t eat between meals,” says Dr Hameed.
Britain is said to consume six billion packets of crisps a year – the equivalent of one ton of crisps every three minutes, or almost 100 packets per person.
Super-size nation
Crockery from the 1970s looks very small now. We’ve gone from an average dinner plate of 9in in diameter to one of 12in. Small wonder meals are now 30 to 50 per cent larger than they were in the 1970s. The same goes for wine glasses, mugs and bowls.
A portion of crisps from a family pack has increased by 50 per cent. Meat lasagne ready meals for one are 39 per cent larger. No wonder we have lost sight of what a healthy amount to eat is. Suddenly, conscientiously eating everything on your plate doesn’t seem so sensible or responsible.
It’s the what rather than how much
“In fact, I ask my patients to forget the word calorie and to erase their often encyclopaedic knowledge of the calorie content of foods, and to free up their brain space for far more useful information.”
Instead, Dr Hameed asks her patients to eat when they are hungry and stop when they are full. “Initially, for some, this sounds like almost impossible advice. However, with support to change to a low-sugar, moderate- protein, fibre-rich diet, which contains good levels of healthy fats, and by turning their backs on ultraprocessed food, they are now using the body’s weight-control biology, and are amazed and excited when they begin to eat when they are hungry and stop when full.”
How we became a nation of over-eaters
Any ideas of your own to eat less wastefully?
Try entering the Champions Awards 2023!
