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Food For Thought

Plans to tackle the prevalence of junk-food and increasing obesity in Irish society should be welcomed. But focusing purely on the calorie count is the wrong way to go about it.

Niall Stokes, 19 Apr 2012

At the heart of great cooking are wonderful ingredients. Fresh fruit and vegetables. Organic meat and wild fish. Seeds, spices and pulses. Chefs in restaurants determined to produce great food know the provenance of everything they serve. And the emphasis is not on regimentation but on creativity. Good chefs want to know that they can stand over the quality of what they are putting on their customers’ plates. This is far more important than whether the calorie count is low, medium or high in a particular dish.

Calories don’t reckon how much salt is in a meal. Calories don’t clock the artificial preservatives. Calories don’t highlight the sugar count. Calories don’t give any indication if something is good for the heart or bad. All of these factors matter at least as much as calories, which can in any event be burned off depending on the amount of exercise the individual does. Indeed, there is a growing sense that the glycaemic index, which ranks carbohydrates according to their effect on blood sugar levels, is a far more important measure than calories.

It is as if someone in the Department of Health imagines that people eating in restaurants is the problem, when that patently is not the case. Certainly a heavier reliance on badly made takeaway and so called ‘convenience’ food is a modern issue. But forcing restaurants to festoon their menus with calorie counts is not going to do anything to change that.

The Brisol-based Children of the 90s project has revealed some fascinating facts, which are as likely to be true in Ireland as the UK. One of the most obvious but important is that young people have far too much salt in their diets – almost certainly as a result of eating junk food and pre-prepared meals. Bottle fed babies who start eating solids early are far more likely to become obese children. Mothers who put on excess weight during the early months of pregnancy are more likely to give birth to overweight babies, who are fatter than the average and more prone to heart disease. And so on.



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