Image copyright Thinkstock People like to have information about their nutrient – but works out how much usage 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, reads a simple icon on nutrient packaging could be the answer.
Picture, if you will, your favourite chocolate barroom.
You may take note of how many calories it has – and wonder just how these calories relate to your everyday life. Sacrificed the average consumer expends six seconds looking at nutrient before making a acquisition this is a lot to cram in.
So how about we acquire life easier for people?
We consider a clearer path of representing people more mindful of the calories they are depleting is for a food or liquor product to too picture 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 roughly 50 instants to burn the calories off or run for 30 instants, perhaps we wouldn’t is so very blas about the number.
This is not “ve been meaning to” intimidate people, 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 we are to ingest the nutritions we do and not put one over load. Or how we might need to readjust our nutritions to accord 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 depleting far more calories than we really expending.
We recognise that exactly to live and gasp we need to ingest a certain number of calories every day – for a serviceman that’s about 2,500 and for the status of women 2,000.
But anything more than this, without a more actively involved life, could guide us to gain weight.
Can you lose weight without weighing calories ?~ ATAGEND
Are we being fooled by nutrient descriptions ?~ ATAGEND
What’s the easy-going path to get health ?~ ATAGEND
We also think these little icons could gently motivate people to be a bit more active in their everyday lives.
Almost half of us aren’t getting enough physical activity. Perhaps that barroom of chocolate showing how long we need to walk might spur us to either place down the chocolate barroom, or get off the bus or tube a stop earlier and stroll.
However, we also know that you can’t out-run a bad diet, so there are limits to how much activity we can do to compensate for how many calories we ingest.
Introducing activity-equivalent calories naming should be a fairly simple pace.
We know the calories contained in many nutrient and liquor pieces. And we know how these equate to activity equivalents.
This doesn’t require legislation. There are one or two nutrient corporations already doing it!
Retailers or nutrient corporations could picture some real leader on the above issues and acquire life a lot easier for us. And perhaps they’d realize shoppers lives healthier in the bargain.