Wed, Nov-07-18, 02:50
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Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
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UK govt guidelines advising high-carb low-fat diet criticised as “deeply flawed"
Quote:
From The Time
London, UK
6 November, 2018
Health efforts need clean air and less drinking
Melanie Phillips
Disease prevention would be easier if ministers acted to curb pollution, alcoholism and gambling
The (British) health secretary Matt Hancock has called on people to make healthier lifestyle choices, such as reducing their consumption of alcohol, sugar, salt, fat and junk food, stopping smoking and staying active. At present, some £97 billion is spent on treating disease but only £8 billion on prevention. Hancock wants to shift the balance by getting people to take more responsibility for their health.
He was immediately criticised for blaming the victim. “People do not ‘choose’ obesity or diabetes or cancer,” said Simon Capewell, professor of public health and policy at Liverpool University. “They have just been overwhelmed by a toxic environment.”
Of course, much ill-health is the result of a genetic and environmental lottery. It’s harder to avoid junk food and unhealthy lifestyles if you are poor, ill-housed and depressed. Yet people are not purely helpless victims of circumstances. They make choices. They are not “overwhelmed” by obesity. They become obese because they eat too much. No one makes them do that. And obesity contributes greatly to ill-health.
While individuals need to take more responsibility for disease prevention, the government needs to do more too. According to research by King’s College London, air pollution is estimated to cause 9,500 deaths each year in London alone and 40,000 early deaths a year across Britain. More than 40 UK towns and cities have reached or exceeded air pollution limits set by the World Health Organisation.
The adverse effects of excessive alcohol are legion. The Alcohol Health Alliance, a group of more than 50 medical organisations, says 23,000 deaths a year are linked to alcohol. A number of studies have found that increasing its price reduces consumption and diminishes the rate of alcohol-related damage including vehicle crashes, disease, violence and other crime.
Yet unlike in Scotland where a minimum price has been set, proposals to do this in England were defeated, reportedly through pressure from the alcohol industry.
Our psychiatric wards are stuffed with patients suffering from cannabis-induced psychosis. Disease prevention obviously requires a policy to reduce the use of an illegal drug responsible for a wide range of illness and damage. Yet Britain has been moving instead towards tacit acceptance of cannabis consumption.
Gambling addiction can produce devastating consequences including suicide. There are now about 430,000 people in Britain with gambling problems, costing the NHS hundreds of millions a year, according to a 2016 report by the IPPR think tank. Yet a plan to reduce to £2 the maximum stake for fixed-odds betting terminals, held to be principally responsible for huge increases in gambling addiction, has been delayed.
Will Hancock’s prevention strategy mean that the government will now cut air pollution, introduce minimum alcohol pricing for England, restore the April 2019 date for lowering the maximum stake for FOBTs and halt the drive towards de facto decriminalisation of cannabis? Don’t hold your breath.
Instead, the government interferes where it should properly keep its distance, confusing the need to get people to take more responsibility for their health with telling them what to do.
For example, Hancock calls on employers to do more to “help improve the health of their staff” by offering free fruit, counselling, bereavement and legal services and cycle-to-work schemes. In other words, he wants to turn employers into branches of social services.
He wants to use digital technology to target individuals or localities for “predictive prevention”. But the government’s record of advice about healthy lifestyles doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
Its guidelines advising a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet have been criticised as “deeply flawed” by Professor David Haslam, chairman of the National Obesity Forum. Cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra said this advice was “more like a metabolic time-bomb than a dietary pattern conducive for good health”.
The chief medical officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies, earned criticism and scorn for saying that women should contemplate the risks of breast cancer before having even one glass of wine. Other experts say, on the contrary, that one glass of wine a day could cut strokes and heart disease.
So will Hancock’s co-ordinated predictive prevention strategy be worth a row of bedpans? On the BBC Today programme, the health secretary agreed that a large proportion of the extra £20 billion being poured into the NHS will go towards prevention and he claims that this will take pressure off frontline services.
It won’t. Pressure on the NHS is overwhelming and insuperable because a health system funded from general taxation will always be unable to keep up with increasing demand.
The unpalatable truth is that the NHS itself militates against individual responsibility because its core assumption of healthcare entitlement is a one-way street.
People will only alter their risky behaviour if they have to contribute to the cost of treating the consequences. That means replacing the NHS with some kind of European-style social insurance system, with higher premiums for self-destructive lifestyles.
Hancock’s ends are sound, but he has ducked facing up honestly to the means.
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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...nking-hztfqn5wk
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