Cheers
06 Feb 2010 Leave a Comment
in The Blog Paper Tags: alcohol, Alcoholics Anonymous, andrew lansley, calories, Conservatives, Health green paper, Nuffield health
Forget finding out Santa doesn’t exist. The single most devastating truth of adulthood is, without a doubt, the fact that alcohol has calories.
And ever since I was greeted, half cooked, by a beer mat with a picture of a bottle of wine and a box of donuts, I’ve been cutting back on the sauce.
Over the last twelve months alcohol has become somewhat of a mastermind specialist subject for me. From working on a responsible drinking campaign for my local PCT, to interviewing 50 alcoholics for an NHS research project; to experiencing my first AA meeting (as a visitor) to writing about the “early intervention” strategy all GPs are directed to perform with new patients demonstrating “hazardous” levels of drinking. Alcohol is my trivial pursuit trump card.
So when I was lucky enough to attend Andrew Lansley’s press launch for the Conservative’s green paper for a healthier Britain, I had to pose a few questions.
First up was how they were going to educate people to understand the impact of centilitres, when the unit measuring system is replaced.
He said that Jamie Oliver’s approach to healthy eating was great, but the Labour took the wrong approach in overloading us with information and creating an army of food fascists who now spy on and confiscate kid’s lunch boxes.
Twice I asked him about the his centilitre education plan; once in the press conference and afterwards when I managed to get five minutes face to face. On both occasions he failed to explain how replacing one system will automatically cure a national appetite for destruction.
One news organisation present asked about his plans to tackle the white collar workers who can, and do, happily polish off a bottle of wine a night. Apparently they’re not on the radar!
This is our shadow health minister who, on camera, said “A bottle of beer is around 120 calories, which is the equivalent of a slice of cake.”
No Andrew, beer contains over 100 calories per half and that is closer to the equivalent of a slice of bread than cake.
Along with his other sound bites it made me realise his camera friendly cholesterol test should have in fact been a reality check.
But that’s a story for another day.
The intrinsic problem is that we are not happy. As a nation we invest more time into getting wasted than we do our looks. His plans to price the poorest people out of this habit will only force their social sectors drinking these products, to use cheaper methods of inebriation; namely soft, and possibly even hard, drugs.
We know there is alcohol in alcohol, we’re even beginning to associate units with glasses. But I stick by the belief that telling people what’s in their drinks; the calories, sulphites, sugar and all the other unnatural additives the drinks companies choose not to declare, is the way forward.
The Anglo Saxon akiles is embedded in our psyche.
Yes it would be nice to stroll down a “café culture” boulevard a la Birley Street, Blackpool. But with destruction so deeply engrained in our psyche, the only way to inspire change is to hammer home the fact that it’s not the alcohol per se that’s making us fat and ugly, it’s everything else they pour in your glass.
