Cycling in Sydney Australia
The rise and rise of Generation O
An interesting and provocative article in the SMH today on the obesity epidemic, and how concerted, co-ordinated government action is required to address it, and, as Tim Gill says, how "...industry groups from food and marketing to transport, road construction and unions have a vested interest in maintaining our obesogenic environment, and each have strong lobbying power with the Federal Government."
There are obvious implications for cycling: instead of investing huge amounts of taxpayers' money in propping up the ailing local car industry, the government could very usefully spend a bit more money on the building and promotion of cycling infrastructure in our cities. A small percentage of the recent car industry bail-out package would have funded a fantastic programme of cycling infrastructure construction for the next several years (and a few percent less of the arbitrarily large car industry hand-out would probably have made no difference to the long-term viability of local (stupidly large) car manufacturing anyway).
Some excerpts from the article:
Louise Hall Health Reporter
February 3, 2009
THE number of obese children will continue to increase unless governments find the political will to take on the powerful food, motor and advertising industries, public health experts say.
...
In the past decade the prevalence of overweight children has almost doubled and numbers of obese children have more than tripled, according to a report in the Medical Journal of Australia.
"There's a lot of talk, there's some money but virtually no real policies to back all this up," professor of population health at Deakin University, Boyd Swinburn, said.
...
But Tim Gill, from the Australasian Society for the Study of Obesity, said piecemeal, short-term programs and education campaigns have not been proven to work.
"Everyone agrees the only way to deal with childhood obesity is to have a co-ordinated plan of action which produces a whole spectrum of interventions at a population level and only government can effectively facilitate that," he said.
He said industry groups from food and marketing to transport, road construction and unions have a vested interest in maintaining our obesogenic environment, and each have strong lobbying power with the Federal Government.
...
If trends continue, a projected 10 million Australians will be overweight and 6.9 million will be obese by 2025, putting a huge strain on the health system from obesity related conditions such as type 2 diabetes, kidney disease and cancer.
Tags: cycling, infrastructure, obesity
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by Doddsy on -
Madame that used to be the case with me (former brewery technician) but its not any more... I maybe have a few beers once a month and the Occasional big weekend.
Its sooo bloody hard for me to lose weight these days.
I guess thats what happens when you combine past liver problems (glandular fever) with getting your body used to riding 40 hours a week.
My body seriously needs to be exercising all the time and my diet needs to be ridiculously strict for me to lose weight.
It sucks =(
-
Permalink Reply by MadameBike on -
Yes you have my vote Dave W, especially if pencil smokers' butts (the pencils not their arses) smoulder away until they are completely burnt out rather than littering our streets (and rock gardens here at Macquarie Uni). :-)
-
Permalink Reply by Rob Russell on -
Interesting theory, but OTOH we could just crave sweet and fatty food because it tastes good and evolution has made us that way.
And the food corporations simply play - or prey - upon our human nature. (Which doesn't make it right, but it's nice and simple.) Perhaps something else held our cravings back in the past, too? Maybe we have become wealthier over recent times (on average) and are now able to afford - and thus have the luxury to crave - more "stuff", including junk food, takeaways, packaged food and 'enrobed' bars, regular restaurant food and so on. Post WWII we have shifted a lot of our working class into so-called "middle class" whilst simultaneously making almost everything cheaper (via mass production, computerisation and other economic efficiencies). It's empowered and enriched more people whilst offering far more choice in foodstuffs, including what we may consider poor food choices. And food makers have set about making those poor food choices more easily available in order to tap the market. The rise of cravings and impulse eating is thus explained: it's just that saturated fat and sweet things taste good and we have the money and access to buy and eat such junk anytime we want. 60 years ago (or less) it was much, much harder to sustain a craving - it was even harder to find shops open on Sundays let alone 24x7; and of course food wasn't as glorified in the mass media like it is now. There's good and bad in there of course.
The other point about the last 60+ years or so is the proliferation of labour-saving devices, especially cars but also every electrical appliance and accessory you can think of....it goes hand-in-hand with industrialisation, globalisation and mass marketing and in many ways is a wonderful thing, but in a very short period of time we have almost totally eliminated every major manually-powered household cleaning or kitchen tool, wiped out the hand mower, removed the need to walk down the street to have a chat (we SMS instead) and largely (in Oz at least) rendered the bicycle a novelty item for the well-off. Whereas pre-WW2 cars were relatively rare ; few had phones; walking or riding to the tram stop or to the shops, work or school was "normal"; the washing machine, ice-cream maker and the meat grinder took actual physical effort; and bicycle racing drew 30,000 people to Henson Park, Marrickville on a Saturday night. Significantly many of us now shop weekly by car at big centralised outlets rather than walk daily to the local shops. And our working lives have similarly been robbed of physical effort. We have simply tipped the world on its head in just a few generations. These "little" things have been the big behavioural changes in our lives.
That leaves scope for exceptions, people who exercise their butts off, watch their diet religiously yet still gain weight for whatever reason; but for the most part increased wealth + decreased daily exercise = increased obesity. Do we thus tax junk food, promote cycling, educate or legislate? How we deal with this, and how quickly, will be an interesting test for our society.
-
Permalink Reply by MadameBike on
-
Dave, I don't eat Mars Bars, or smoke cigarettes, yet I see the same marketing that you see. I think eating junk food is just as much a lifestyle choice as smoking.
-
Permalink Reply by yogi on -
there was a mars bar commercial with bike messengers in it
.. it showed guys going through trafik like water around rocks in a creek and their social attitude was happy and theay hug out together during work and play, the play bit was the same bunch of bike couriers playing city soccer.. do you remember the add? there was a guy who had long white lycra pants with a swirl pattern on them.. he was a good looking bloke indeed.
not to mention the 35mm camera on the front of a bike being ridden around town for a few days
IT did make me want to ride my bike more... is that what you meant?
-
Permalink Reply by ♫ Kylie on -
I'm sorry....white lycra pants? Is there not some rule against that? :oP
-
Permalink Reply by Doddsy on
-
"there was a mars bar commercial with bike messengers in it"
Now i know why i drink beer.
-
Permalink Reply by MadameBike on
-
My point is that you can choose to ignore marketing efforts, even if they are aimed at you, whether it is for cigarettes, cars, alcoholic drinks, junk food, housing/land packages, loans, etc, etc. Just because marketers aim at you, doesn't make you a victim unless you choose to respond.
Also, I don't think junk food is as "addictive" as cigarettes. My understanding is that nicotine actually works on the central nervous system, creating a physical addiction, whereas the "feel good" aspect of junk food is more psychological. However, I am willing to accept that I may be wrong in my understanding if someone more qualified than me on health matters (hey BB) corrects me.
-
Permalink Reply by Bennelong Bicyclist on -
Yes, nicotine binds to certain types of acetylcholine receptors in the brain, where is has many different effects, including an increase in acetylcholine levels, and the release of other neurotransmitters such as glutamate and endorphins. There are arguments over which of these biochemical effects is most responsible for the addictive propoerties of nicotine, but everyone agrees, nicotine addiction has a clear biological basis.
"Junk food addiction" is a much less well-defined condition, and there is a lot of research and a lot of argument over whether it really exists and if so, what is it exactly and what is the pathophysiology behind it. However, there is certainly evidence of a biochemical basis to cravings for (and perhaps an addiction to) both carbohyrdate-rich foods, and fatty foods, and both, involving various peptide neurotransmitters released by the small intestine in response to a Big Mac and large fries - neurotransmitter peptides which then have a effect on your brain. Yup, chemicals released by your guts in response to what type of food you eat seem to have a direct biochemical effect on your psychological state. Brillat-Savarin knew that long ago, of course. But it is clear that there are also large psychological and social aspects to "junk food addiction".
-
Permalink Reply by ♫ Kylie on
-
How does this tie in to the tale about chocolate causing a chemical reaction in the female body that is akin to another...erm...activity....? Or is this one all psychological and no physiological?
-
Permalink Reply by Michael O' on -
Those are the kinds of questions that turned Sigmund Freud into a cocaine junkie...
-
Permalink Reply by Rob Russell on
-
These are different things though. Almost everyone is lured by certain foods, especially sweet or fatty food, so Mars bars are a pretty easy sell as most of us are pre-wired to look for sweets and eat to excess. But no-one is born craving a cigarette (well, maybe if their mother was a heavy smoker...), so we have to trick ourselves by peer pressure or really slick marketing into "trying" them, and that's when an unfortunate design flaw comes into play - we happen to get addicted to some molecules (like caffeine and nicotine).
Evolution (another theory we can't as yet prove for certain but has so far stood up to rigorous examination) has given us an appetite which leans towards what we need both now and in the future... so we crave sweets to give us the energy to escape that tiger now and fats to store for the winter. We are wired also to "eat more", "just in case". So with wealth and cheap Mars bars we can indeed "eat more". But we no longer need to resort to the "just in case" binges, we just do it anyway because we evolved with long winters and famines and still have that "urge" to overeat when it's available.
Cigarettes OTOH are one of those flukes - someone somehow smoked or more probably chewed a tobacco leaf and found that the nicotine stimulated what we now call nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. That's not natural, that's man being creative, or perhaps stupid. Of course once you stimulate those receptors they want more and become desensitised... that's an addiction.
© 2010 Created by DamianM.
