Aussie bloaters gorging on junk food 'each and every day' Australians have been warned to get their dietary act together, after a survey revealed a growing and alarming trend for junk food excess. According to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), 40,000+ respondents to its Healthy Diet Score Survey – "a scientifically validated survey which …
"3rd school says, we all pay for your bloody healthcare"
Maybe, but obesity tends to encourage things like heart attacks, which mean that the bloaters don't get to claim the pension they've had to save for, nor do they burden the health service for three decades of retirement. A PROPER cost benefit analysis that took account of the financial and health effects would see fatty foods, booze and fags given subsidies.
Tim Worstal's commented in this thread, so how about it, Sir? A proper economic analysis of the costs and benefits?
Since you're only worried about the money and not the people, I'll answer accordingly.
It all depends on all of your vices and the results. Heart attacks and strokes can be quick and cheap or if medical is prompt, it's drawn out. However, if you end up with diabetes, the cost is horrendous. Meds, dialysis, amputation after amputation (and the prosthetics) before the Grim Reaper shows up.
If you want cheap... start smoking and push everyone to smoke. Lung cancer is relatively cheap according to the insurance underwriters. Or go for not wearing a helmet or a super large helmet and riding a motorcycle.
Even the "healthy lifestyle" has it's costs down the road.. exercise wears out joints, for example.
No one gets out of the this life alive, so maybe the answer is Kool-Aid with additives. But I suppose you would refuse it?
> "Even the "healthy lifestyle" has it's costs down the road.. exercise wears out joints, for example."
I'm 56, and I find that even with much weight lifting and all-terrain hiking, my joints seem to be geting more fit than before. I think the resistance training is doing it, along with religious stretching.
"exercise wears out joints, for example."
So does working on your feet for 25 years. My knees are shot. Glad those days are over! I lead a healthier lifestyle than I did then, but we gotta live our lives.
Pick your poison(s)... mix responsibly... but stay away from the kool-aide based alternatives.
No one gets out of the this life alive, so maybe the answer is Kool-Aid with additives. But I suppose you would refuse it?
Au contraire, I have behaviours that expose me to specific health risks. But I choose what I do, and for example I keep my weight under control. If the hambeasts amongst us are going to have their pie-munching constrained by the state, then logically we all need to be forced to give up our various poisons - in particular, sloth, unhealthy (as opposed to excess) diet, booze, fags. The public health fascists are currently trying to paint sugar as the new arsenic.
Now, call me old fashioned, but it sounds a bit grim to have a state approved diet, high in veg, low in fat, red meant and bacon, no sweets or choccies, no smoking, no drinking, and to have to do a state-mandated volume of exercise. For those that want that lifestyle, good luck to them, but don't expect me to vote for it - I shall be at the barricades, fighting heroically alongside the freedom fighting chain smokers, drunkards and big boned.
> if you end up with diabetes, the cost is horrendous. Meds, dialysis,
> amputation after amputation (and the prosthetics) before the Grim Reaper shows up
None of which are inevitable (apart from the meds). It doesn't take a great deal to successfully manage t2 diabetes - just some will power (no - I won't stuff myself on cream cakes and sugary snacks) and a sensible diet (and not relying on "I know I've just eaten lots of sugar so I'll take an extra tablet" - the feedback loop itself is broken..)
And ending up with diabetes isn't always as a result of lifesyle - sometimes (like me) you end up being t2 as a result of having a mother with a very large family history of it. Despite being (reasonably) fit and watching what I ate I still ended up t2 after a period of intense stress. And none of the (largely snake oil) 'therapies' that promise to end t2d actually work except in certain fringe cases.
The pie looks like it might be worth sinking the dentures into it, but tomato ketchup on a pie?
Australian meat pies seem to be topped with ketchup - or tomato sauce as wiki puts it.** Ketchup is also apparently one of the vital ingredients in an Australian pie floater^^: pea soup, drop a pie in it, garnish with tomato sauce.
**Footnotes indicate that Australian "tomato sauce" differs from ketchup in that the former lacks vinegar. That'd certainly change the flavor and warrant a different name.
^^As an aside, this is an entirely different usage of the word 'floater' than in Americanese. In Americanese, 'floater' is either a police term for a dead body found in water, or an immature term for buoyant material in a toilet. I'm going to have trouble using it in connection with food.
Ketchup is also apparently one of the vital ingredients in an Australian pie floater^^: pea soup, drop a pie in it, garnish with tomato sauce.
As delightfully referenced by Pratchett in The Last Continent as the "Meat pie floater" (don't ask WHAT meat).
In Americanese, 'floater' is either a police term for a dead body found in water, or an immature term for buoyant material in a toilet.
Or, apparently, "a company employee at a tradeshow who is assigned the duty of 'floating' between areas of the booth". Leastways, that's how the 'merkin company I work for uses it. Being told by the septics, upon arrival at London Olympia, that colleagues and I were "floaters" used to raise many a juvenile snigger.
Beer, because beer + meat pie... mmmm...
a Pie is it? I thought it might be a burger as doctored up in the UK; we generally put condiments inside the bun in the US.
My incorrect assumption I see. However here pies use any of various types of fruit,occasionally vegetables like sweet potatoes or pumpkin, And therearesome meat pies,but called "pot pies", implying the filling came prepared from a pot i gather. All, as far as I know, sans the Pot. Maybe creatively though in Colorado, Washington (State), or Oregon...
You either eat that much or not there is no place in the sentence for equivalent, unless they are taking there yearly sugar intake and converting it into how much chocolate they would have to eat in order to get that much sugar.
Lets see chocolate is about 50% sugar so "eat the equivalent of 32kg of chocolate" is 16Kg. Apples are 10%, so you just say they eat the eat the equivalent of 160kg of apples (from a purely sugar point of view). Sounds a lot more healthy now!
Without knowing what this "These include chocolate, of which Australians "eat the equivalent of 32kg" per year." means the rest is mostly junk.
> "eat the equivalent of 32kg of chocolate" is 16Kg. Apples are 10%
Apples contain a good bit more than that - but it isn't generally available. The sugar in chocolate is generally sucrose which is only one step from glucose and easily converted so your blood sugar levels tend to look like the north face of the Eiger..
Apples OTOH, have a lot of their sugars as fructose and locked up within nice cellulose packages[1] that your gut has to work harder to open. So your blood sugar rise looks more like a small roundabout in profile and the broken insulin feedback system has more time to adjust.
Also, Apples contain citric acid and acidic things seem to also slow down sugar take-up (dunno why!).
[1] Which is why drinking sweet fruit juices is generally not a good idea for t2 diabetics - all the sugar is now in solution and much much easier to absorb. Even things like rhubarb juice contain a suprising amount of sugar..
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