Physician Heal Thyself

I am really becoming a little tired with Nanny's incessant whining and lecturing about what we eat.

Her obsession with fat and cholesterol really is rather tedious, and quite frankly wrong.

Think about it for a moment, a car needs oil for its engine to work; it stands to reason that the same applies to the human body.

The more fat that is in our diet, and hence our veins, the easier it is for the blood to flow through our veins.

Obvious really!

Anyhoo, Nanny's chums in the The British Medical Association (BMA) are yet again calling for action on obesity.

The BMA is calling for radical Nanny action to tackle rising childhood obesity. In a new report, Preventing Childhood Obesity, the BMA recommends that strict guidelines be drawn up on the usual suspects of; salt, sugar and fat content of school meals.

They also say that vending machines selling unhealthy products, such as fizzy drinks, be banned from school premises.

The BMA then go on to request other bans to be imposed.

How very democratic of them!

They want to ban television advertisements, aimed at school-aged children, which promote unhealthy food or drink (who decides what is healthy may I ask?).

They then go on to demand that celebrities and children's television characters should only endorse products that meet nutritional standards, set out by the Food Standards Agency.

Dr Vivienne Nathan, BMA head of science and ethics, shrilly warns:

"It is madness that at a time when children are being told to eat less and do more exercise, they go to school and are sold fizzy drinks and doughnuts and do less than two hours' time-tabled exercise a week,".

She then goes on to say:

"Children are being bombarded with mixed messages. They might learn about healthy eating at school but then they go home and [on television] see celebrities eating hamburgers, crisps or drinking fizzy drinks (ed: heaven forefend!)."

Then she really lets rip:

"Children and parents are surrounded by the marketing of unhealthy cereals, snacks and processed meals this has to stop."

You will notice how she slips in the word "parents" into her rant, then climaxing (can I use the word "climaxing" in a public blog?) with the phrase "this has got to stop".

That shows how Nanny and her doctor chums are really thinking; they feel that it is not just children that can't be trusted to know what is good for them, but adults as well.

Nanny wants to control what we all eat, she has no liking of freedom of choice or individuality; she wants to ban all proscribed foods.

Now I have a few observations about this:

• It is not Nanny's place to dictate what we may eat or drink



• We live in a free market economy, as such it is the right of the consumer to consume whatever he or she wishes to consume



• A free market economy allows, and indeed proactively encourages, the marketing of products; banning advertising, on the grounds of disapproval of the product, effectively destroys the free market and takes us towards a state controlled dying economy (like France)



• Banning adverts, merely because they advertise products that Nanny disapproves of is wrong..PERIOD!



• Nanny, to my knowledge, has never acted so promptly when products that were clearly a con trick were marketed; take endowment mis-selling as a fine example of the duplicity of Nanny's mind set (see www.endowmentdiary.com for details of the £100BN fraud perpetrated on 8 million British people)



• Doctors have the highest rate of alcoholism, smoking and drug dependency of all the professional classes; it most certainly is not their place to tell us how to live our lives.

Physician heal thyself!