Tomatoes Face the Axe Under Labour’s ‘Nonsensical’ Junk Food Crackdown
Labour’s “nonsensical” junk food crackdown could see tomatoes kicked out of pasta sauces and ready meals. The Telegraph has more.
Food chiefs have warned that government plans to label thousands of products containing sugar as unhealthy would encourage companies to replace natural ingredients with additives.
Products labelled as unhealthy under the new system – from pureed fruit to vegetables – could be included in a ban on advertising junk food before the broadcasting watershed.
If ministers decide to include them, it means products such as pasta sauces and fruit yogurts could be forbidden from being advertised before 9pm if they are above the sugar thresholds.
Under a planned crackdown on junk food, unveiled by Labour last week, health officials set out plans to update the classification system for what is deemed healthy and unhealthy. The new methodology will include “free sugars” that are released from fruit and vegetables when they are pureed or mashed.
The overhaul is part of a wider crackdown on obesity and forms part of Labour’s 10-year health plan, which aims to reduce the £11 billion-a-year cost of obesity to the NHS.
However, food bosses said including free sugars in the calculations would encourage manufacturers to strip out natural products, making it harder for the public to eat their five portions of fruit and vegetables a day and get a range of nutrients and fibre.
Stuart Machin, the Chief Executive of Marks & Spencer, labelled the plans “nonsensical” and said the proposed change “encourages us to remove fruit purees from yogurts or tomato paste from pasta sauces and replace them with artificial sweeteners”. …Health officials are considering whether to use the new classification system – officially referred to as the Nutrient Profiling Model (NPM) – for the junk food advertising ban, which currently only applies to products such as crisps, sweets and biscuits.
If taken forward, many products made with fruit and vegetable purees would be banned from being advertised before 9pm. The watershed limit would apply to sauces, ready meals and fruit juices.
Kate Halliwell, the Chief Scientific Officer at the Food and Drink Federation (FDF), said companies would be likely to consider reducing the amount of fruit and vegetables from their recipes in order to escape the restrictions.
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“The new methodology will include “free sugars” that are released from fruit and vegetables when they are pureed or mashed.”
Barking mad, these people.
And what happens to those sugars if we just eat the fruit and veg not pureed or mashed – do they just disappear from the Universe?
Just about every fruit and veg contains carbohydrates, some as sugars or starch or other complex molecules. In the gut ALL carbohydrates in whatever form (save some very complex long-chain ones) are converted into glucose – a sugar – to provide an energy supply. Glucose not used immediately is converted to glycogen and stored to be converted back to glucose as and when needed.
It is hard to understand the level of sheer ignorance, incompetence and stupidity which surely must have reached its peak in the political class as exemplified by their Covid response and Net Zero – now this.
The revised menus in Westminster should make for interesting reading.
Since our rulers are forever vomiting up slop, maybe they actually eat slop all the time.
Banning all alcohol would be a good start.
Lead by example.
Close the bars in Westminster. Fantastic idea.
Might as well given that they usually conduct themselves as if they are permanently pissed.
I recently read an article about the way processing of fruits to puréed or drinkable forms causes a transformation of CIS unsaturated fatty acids to trans fatty acids. Something to do with the way the C bond is altered during processing. Basically healthy fruit is converted to unhealthy juices/purees. So there does appear to be a case for consideration here. The question in my mind is why they are singling out tomatoes. I do recall that the article concluded that it’s the amount consumed that is the problem and that it would be better to consume the fresh product rather than the processed product.
Then there is the problem of labelling, are the product parameters listed on packaging pre processed values or post? So the sugar content after processing will be higher, people will be fooled into thinking that they are consuming low sugar products when the processing has converted them to high sugar content.
I can’t recall the article but I think it may have been something produced in relation to taking creatine to reduce mitochondrial stress which would increase the uptake of glucose thereby reducing blood sugar levels, but DYOR.
As an aside for those interested, I suffer from post prandial hypoglycaemia, basically a situation caused by the incorrect uptake of sugar causing an insulin spike followed by an insulin crash after eating. The result being a total and catastrophic loss of energy which meant even simple tasks became impossible. So I was researching the causes and came across an article saying that taking 5 mg of creatine per day helps to solve the problem. I tried it and it works to a degree in my case. I still have problems but not as severe and I’ve tested it by measuring my sugar levels before and a couple of hours after eating and as long as I’m reasonably careful I’m more or less back to normal.
There is a lot appearing about creatine and from what I can make out the pharmaceutical companies don’t want people to know about it benefits. So for anyone interested, especially older people it can be beneficial as it can help to increase muscle mass primarily because it utilises insulin in a more effective way. But it’s under researched so caution is advised. But it works for me.
But according to (inter alia) the late Michael Mosley in a BBC article: “Cook tomatoes to boost their health benefits”, Apparently increases lycopene content.
Yes, but cooking is different to processing.
According to some nutritionists, lypocene is protective against cancer and it doesn’t matter whether tomatoes are in ketchup, sauces or fresh. It’s present in all of them.
The government is proposing to label certain healthy foods as unhealthy? Yep that sounds correct in ‘1984’ Great Britain. And the net result could be poorer diets for many people. Might this mean that people’s health suffers? And that they become more dependant on pharmaceuticals? Surely not ! Our government wouldn’t do such a thing.
It’s all in the planning.
The overhaul is part of a wider crackdown on obesity
No it’s not. It’s part of the slow-motion introduction of the marxo-fascist total-control state.
In any case, governments don’t “crack down” they “cock up”.
Enabled in large measure by middle
class go-gooders. The preoccupation with “healthy eating” seems to me a
largely middle class one.
I am decidedly middle class myself but I am increasingly of the view that large portions of the middle class are a bloody menace- far too fond of sticking their noses into other people’s business.
Sorry, this might all be my fault. I regularly point out to people that a glass of beautifully natural grape juice contains WAY more evil, evil sugar than the same glass of Coca-cola. Perhaps one of these people decided to do something about it to keep us all safe.
It actually doesn’t contain any sugar because sugar is an industrial product created from certainly plants, eg, sugar cane or sugar beets, and added to Cola. Nobody ever added any to grapefruits and hence, they don’t contain it, either.
The notion that a coarse-grained mechanical process like pressing fruit juice neatly breaks their structure down at exactly the molecular level, that is, that it can free sugar but never destroy it despite it’s a much larger than junctions it has to other molecules is ridiculous. My guess would that this is more a case of chemical tests for added sugar also triggering for naturally occuring sugars and that some egghead thus came up with the conclusion that this simply must be the same.
Bureaucrats will be bureaucrats.
And the braying public will thank them for keeping them safe.
“..makes it harder for the public to eat their five portions of fruit and vegetables a day..”Dr Google tells me that “Five fruit a day import on average 450 calories.”
And
“It generally takes approximately 8,000 to 12,000 steps (roughly 4–6 miles) to burn 500 calories, with 10,000 steps being a common benchmark for a 500-calorie burn. The exact number depends on your weight, walking speed, and terrain, as heavier individuals burn more calories per step”
Perhaps, the answer to obesity is what Marie Lloyd used to sing over hundred years ago: “A little bit of what you fancy does you good”.
“Five-a-day” was an advertising slogan by a Californian fruit and veg wholesaler decades ago, to boost sales.
That an advertising slogan with no scientific basis is Government advice from its Chief Medical advisors tells all we need to know about these lying grifters.
They should all have five-a-day, daily shoved up where the monkey puts his nuts.
Whoops I commented before reading this.
And… ‘five a day’ has about as much $cience to it as one of Pantsdown’s models.
I don’t follow Government nutritional advice closely (actually I generally ignore it, since it’s bollocks) but I do seem to recall that they suggest 3 veg and 2 fruit. Not 5 of each.
I doubt whether Marie was singing about tomatoes.
So natural fruit and vegetables are unhealthy but artificial sweeteners, presumably manufactured by the Government’s best friends in the global elites are very healthy. Similarly, natural meat is going to kill us, both from CO2 production and the awful fat it contains, but highly processed vegetarian and vegan food pushed by the food industry are just what we want. How did we survive for millennia on what we grew and reared ourselves?
Moreover, how did we manage to increase our lifespan way beyond the natural lifespan of humans which is about 30 years before the WHO enlightened us with its very great wisdom?
” How did we survive for millennia on what we grew and reared ourselves?”
We didn’t have Governments. Time to get rid.
Governments have existed for more than the last 5000 years, as evidenced by the fact that the earliest written texts are usually government accounts of something.
Hear, hear 👏
That’s a tough one Cotford 😀
IF theywant to tackle obesity –
!. Encourage exercise and fresh air. Open windows (especialy not allowed).
2.Tax processed foods which contain junk additives/colouring/preservatives (good luck taking bigfood to task on that one).
3.Stop frightening joe public re Net Zero, pandemics, Russian invaders
4.Ban all vaccinations and really upset bigpharma and MSM.
There is penty of evidence that obesity is caused by the immune system not working properly (vaccines cause autoimmunedisease which corrupts proper insulin reg) – but of course the narrative is the other way round – hence the rush for those wonderful slimming injections/drugs – which will liberate the obese and free them to work (always assuming there are any proper jobs left).
How about just leaving people alone?
“Obesity” is a manufactured crisis like climate change needing bureaucrats and Government “action”.
100% agree that people should be allowed to go to hell their own way.
There do seem to be a lot of people about who could be a lot healthier were they to make different choices. Whether you’d call this a “crisis” or not depends on your view of the world and what life is all about. Are you the kind of person who lives your life and leaves other people to live theirs as long as they don’t actively harm you, or are you the kind of person who thinks every bad situation is fixable and someone ought to be fixing it?
The government simply has no business telling people what to eat or how weighty they’re allowed to be.
There’s an exceedingly large number of different healthy eating tribes whose theories about healthy eating all differ very much, if they’re not entirely opposed to each other, and that some members of them have managed to infiltrate organisations like the WHO and now want dictate their particular schemes to us doesn’t mean they have or even just should have the right to do this.
Eating isn’t political.
They are coming for your sugar. Then they come for your bread. Then they will come for your chips. You will eat only gruel and be pleased to get enough.
I foresee an outbreak of food ‘speakeasies’ and farmers becoming even more hated by the Government.
I nearly fell off my chair in shock at a government policy doing more harm than good. To be fair I would be far more shocked if they proposed something that would actually work but of course in 19 long months that has yet to happen.
I’m in Lanzarote right now. Older crowd of mainly British and Irish holidaymakers and ex pats. From the looks of them I’m not sure they are interested in the government’s ideas about “healthy eating.
F….ing MORONS
The answer of course is DON’T WATCH TV. I haven’t for over 5 years now and it’s done me the power of good.
Liberating, isn’t it! Add to that the resolution to never ever vote for an establishment political party and you are doubly liberating yourself from supporting the fraudsters in both Westminster and MSM.
Here we go again – the public health fascists on the rampage. Do they think that because they are clever there shall be no more cakes, ale and spaghetti bolognese?