Nicola Roxon thinks were too fat, smoke too much and drink too much. And all of this overindulgence is costing the country a motza. But don’t worry she’s got a solution. She’s going to nag us to death instead.
This week she announced she’s creating the National Preventative Health Agency (NPHA). This brand spanking new, taxpayer funded thingo will ”push, cajole and lead” families, schools, workplaces, industries, clubs and community organisations to encourage healthier living.
You don’t have to exercise too much imagination to understand what that’s going to look like. Get ready to be told you need to exercise more, eat less fat, stop smoking and stop drinking. Nicola’s health taskforce has observed that the stuff we’ve been told to do for 30 years isn’t working, and their solution is, ah, to do more of it?
Its timely then, that just last week, the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne published the results of a study into exactly how effective that kind of nagging is. The research team asked 66 general practitioners to administer advice “targeting change in nutrition, physical activity, and sedentary behaviour.” The advice was in accordance with the national healthy living guidelines, exactly the same guidelines that Nicola plans to “cajole” us with.
In the study, 258 obese Melbourne children were randomly assigned to either an intervention or a control group. The children in the intervention group saw their GP four times over a 12 week period and received all the recommended advice about nutrition and exercise. The kids in the control group lived life as normal without any nagging from their doctor.
Twelve months later, the researchers checked in with the kids to see what difference it made. The result was that the counselling “did not improve BMI, physical activity, or nutrition in overweight or mildly obese 5-10 year olds.” The researchers went on to note that “and it would be very costly if universally implemented.”
Details are a bit light on at the moment, but I don’t think Nicola is planning to have our doctors nag us once a month. Even if she did, this study suggests the outcome would be exactly the same as doing nothing. And doing nothing sounds like it might be quite a bit cheaper.
Our standard health advice might be firing blanks but elsewhere in the world, similar studies with slightly different advice have achieved significantly more impressive outcomes. In the UK, 644 schoolchildren were divided into two groups. One group was told they would be healthier if they stopped drinking sugar (in the form of soft drinks) and the control group was not told that. The message was delivered in four one hour lessons (one per term) during a school year.
The group of kids who weren’t told about sugar got fatter. By the end of the school year, there were 7.5 percent more overweight and obese kids in that group than there were at the start. But in the other group there were slightly less (.2 percent) fat kids. No one was forcing the children to stop drinking sugar and they didn’t entirely stop. They just slightly reduced the amount they drank on average.
The UK study was done in 2001 and adds to the pile of over 80 studies which say that if we drink less sugar we lose weight. This kind of evidence seems to have escaped the mighty deductive powers of our health hierarchy. Because even in the face of unequivocal proof that the advice we give our children doesn’t work, we’re lining up for more of the same.
Nicola, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. It doesn’t matter how often you nag us about exercising more and eating less fat or how many quangos you create to do it. The advice is wrong and it won’t get more right by saying it more often. It’s time to start paying attention to what the science really says rather than what Big Sugar would like us to believe it says.
Simple solution- tax the hell out of Petrol so that parents stop driving themselves and the kids everywhere and they have to walk, cycle or at least walk to the bus or train stop.
I seriously doubt there is more energy going into these kids then previous generations- they just aren’t “applying” that energy to anything but sitting around playing games and staying safe indoors.
Parents are coddling children to the point of physically and psychologically harming them and shows like Today Tonight, Current Affair and their ilk which try and make parents fearful of letting children do anything that could possibly make them break a sweat is appalling.
Billions of people on earth liv and get around using those funny silts attached to our hips, they are called legs and the car is a dinosaur we seem to think we can’t live without. Truth be told, we can’t live with it if we want to ah… survive with any sort of health or future for those darling children we want to cosset in airbags an a 4WD chassis.
Petrol running out, climate getting hotter, children getting fatter. Join the dots.
The government has bought into the rationalist argument that obesity, smoking etc are ‘knowledge deficit disorders’. Possibly this is because it looks effective – afterall there are all those ads and posters – without any chance that it will actually damage commercial intersts. It goes against evidence that peoples decisions are influenced by their environment and that, if you saturate people with junk food advertising for example, they will not act in their rational self interest. I hope, but don’t expect, the NHPA will have a broader understanding of health promotion than the social marketing credo of “Make a flashy scare ad” ad hope people change.
It is infinitely depressing to realize that Canberra has so much of our money that they-the people who mind the politicians -have to scrape ever deeper into the think- bin to come up with ways to use taxpayers money.
The police from the departments of Political Correctness have, like the sorcerer’s
apprentice, multiplied by quantum leaps. There’s a whole new branch of this department now devoted to the latest idiocy of Home-Birthing. NO I AM NOT anti-Home Birthing, by I am against the pious platitudes of the recent converts.
You make a good case for reducing sugar intake as a means to controlling weight gain, but there is no doubt that the right kind of education, propaganda or whatever does work – witness the reduction in tobacco use.
I imagine that you have to get the parents on side if you wish to attack the consumption of excessive amounts of soft drink, and also attack the insidious advertisement of Coke, Pepsi etc.
Society is so much more affluent these days than when children’s parents and grandparents where young; then a soft drink would be a reward or occasional treat maybe once or twice a week. Now it appears to a standard part of the diet.
This has got nothing to do with actually improving people’s health or anything like that, its to do with governments spending a fortune on government ads to give us the impression they are ‘doing something’
This seemed to start with the Howard government, with the stupid ‘be alert be alarmed’ ads, which were really there to give the impression they were doing something for us.
Now we are bombarded on TV and on websites with endless pointless ads from State and Federal governments, telling us how great they are, and not to smoke and drink, and exercise, and to re-elect them, and that the internet is dangerous.
I think its basically an admission from these governments that its just too hard to enact meaningful reforms (that might cost money) so papering everything in glossy PR bullshit is a lot easier.
It really is extremely insulting to the average voter to be forced to pay to be lied to.