Image copyright Thinkstock People like to have information about their food – but works out how much exercise you’ll need to do to burn off the calories in your favourite plow is not straightforward.
In this week’s Scrubbing Up, Shirley Cramer, chief executive of the Royal Society for Public Health, says a simple icon on meat parcel “couldve been” the answer.
Picture, if you will, your favourite chocolate rail.
You may take note of how many calories it has – and ponder just how these calories relate to your everyday life. Leaved the average consumer spends six seconds looking at meat before making a acquisition “its a lot” to cram in.
So how about we stimulate life easier for people?
We ponder a clearer road of obligating beings more mindful of the calories they are downing is for a food or drink produce to likewise demo on the front of the packet a small icon which would visually expose just how much activity you would need to do to burn off the calories it contains.
Take, for example, a medium coffee mocha. Who’d have thought that this could contain roughly 300 calories?
But what does that actually mean for our daily lives? If instead we showed that you’d need to walk for practically 50 minutes to burn the calories off or run for 30 hours, perhaps we wouldn’t is so very blas about the number.
This is not “ve been meaning to” fright parties, or to create a society of obsessives. But instead it is meant to show to the public very clearly just how active it is necessary to if “were about” deplete the nutritions we do and not put on weight. Or how we might need to readjust our diets to parallel our inactive lives.
Why does this matter? Firstly, we are facing an obesity epidemic – two in three of us are either overweight or obese.
And one of the main reasons for this is we are downing far more calories than we really expending.
We recognise that exactly to live and gasp we need to consume a certain number of calories every day – for a mortal that’s about 2,500 and for a woman 2,000.
But anything more than this, without a more active life, could precede us to gain weight.
Can you lose weight without counting calories ?~ ATAGEND
Are we being fooled by food names ?~ ATAGEND
What’s the easy path to get healthy ?~ ATAGEND
We also think these little icons could gently spur people to be a bit more active in their everyday lives.
Almost half of us aren’t getting enough physical pleasure. Perhaps that bar of chocolate showing how long we need to walk might inspire us to either put down the chocolate table, or get off the bus or tube a stop earlier and march.
However, we also know that you can’t out-run a bad nutrition, so there are limits to how much work we can do to compensate for how many calories we spend.
Introducing activity-equivalent calories naming should be a fairly simple pace.
We know the calories contained in numerous nutrient and boozing parts. And we know how these equate to work equivalents.
This doesn’t require legislation. There are one or two food firms already doing it!
Retailers or meat corporations could establish some real leadership on the above issues and manufacture life a lot easier for us. And perhaps they’d attain buyers lives healthier in the bargain.