A new perspective on obesity

There’s a degree of incongruity in the fact that the two major problems facing this country are child poverty and obesity. Dr Jonathan Boston, professor of public policy at Victoria University, ruffled more than a few feathers last week when he said that there are children living in New Zealand in circumstances not much different from those living in the slums of India. “They are in houses that don’t have heating, in caravans that don’t have running water and in families that simply don’t have enough food of the right kind every day,” Boston claimed.

It is undeniable that some New Zealand children are living in circumstances as outlined by Dr Boston, but surely it is drawing the longest of bows to equate their plight to that of the many children living in the sort of slums we associate with India. Child mortality statistics from agencies like the World Bank would no doubt confirm this.

The government countered Dr Boston’s concerns by listing the money they spend in an effort to alleviate this situation: $1.15 billion in accommodation assistance, $182 million in childcare assistance, $260 million in hardship support, $1.25 billion for the DPB, $16.9 million for out of school care, $267 million for child support, $1.93 billion for family support, $494 million for work tax credits, $176 million for paid parental leave, $32 million for parental and family tax credits and $1.58 billion in early childhood education subsidies.

For a population of 4.5 million it could be argued that we have an extremely generous welfare state.

Obesity of course is another matter. From the images we’ve seen from the slums of India obesity is not a problem over there. There is obesity amongst our poorest citizens here and is usually a result of the wrong food choices which are often the least expensive.

It now seems likely that we have all been making the wrong choices of food and this is because of misdiagnosed information fed to us in the 1980’s. The cover of last weeks’ Time magazine had a photo of a nob of butter with the headline “Eat Butter; scientists labelled fat the enemy - why they were wrong.”

Back in the early 1980’s we were all urged to eat less high-fat red meat, eggs and dairy products and replace these with more calories from fruits, vegetables and especially carbohydrates. These instructions were widely adhered to.

However new research suggests that it’s the over-consumption of carbohydrates, sugar and sweeteners that is chiefly responsible for the epidemics of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Refined carbohydrates, like those in “wheat” bread, hidden sugar, low-fat crackers and pasta causes changes in blood chemistry that encourage the body to store the calories as fat and intensify hunger, making it much more difficult to lose weight. “The argument against fat was totally and completely flawed,” says Dr Robert Lustig, a paediatrician at the University of California, and President of the Institute for Responsible Nutrition. “We’ve traded one disease for another.”

The disease we traded is cardiovascular disease which is still the number one killer in western societies. The incidence of heart disease has fallen, but experts believe this has come about as a result of better emergency care, less smoking and widespread use of cholesterol-controlling drugs like statins.

The vilification of fat is now deeply embedded in our culture. Ironically our fat stock buyers demand that farmers produce lean stock, skim milk has replaced full cream milk and the margarine section of the chilled display cabinets in our supermarkets has overwhelmed butter by about ten to one.

“We have known for some time that fats found in vegetables like olives and in fish like salmon can actually protect against heart disease. Now it’s becoming clear that even the saturated fat found in a medium-rare steak or a slab of butter, once public health enemies numbers one and two, has a more complex and, in some cases, benign effect on the body than previously thought,” said the Time cover story.

I’m not sure just how all this helps the poorest of the poor in New Zealand, but perhaps a low cost McDonalds’ happy meal is not such a bad option on the odd occasion and porridge with full cream milk can make a deliciously fortifying breakfast.

But it will be huge paradigm shift for society to make after nearly four decades of believing fat was fatal. Consumer habits are deeply formed and I’m still reluctant to put cream in my coffee.

Those who are concerned about obesity need to know that skipping is the best way to lose weight. Skip lunch, skip dinner, then skip dessert.

“If you were in a hot air balloon with Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill and you were losing altitude, which one would you throw out?” - Harry Hill

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What's in a name?

Back in 1986 I spent six weeks in Brazil leading a Rotary Group Study Exchange team. We were billeted by locals in the Amazon area adjacent to the vast rain forest. Before we left on our intrepid journey we were given some instruction in the language - Portuguese - by the honorary consul and we were emphatically told that the embroidered pockets on our team blazers must have Brazil spelt correctly, which as far as the Brazilians are concerned is Brasil. Apparently it infuriates them that the rest of the world spells it Brazil.

This will have come home to those of you who are watching the Fifa World Cup.

Brazil was discovered by the Portuguese and the sailors encountered a beautiful tree which had red-coloured wood which they named “Pau-brasil” which means brasil wood. The name came from the word “brasa” which translates as “hot coal, ember” in Portuguese.

Much of this wood was cut down and sent back to Portugal.

The reason we call it Brazil is because the Portuguese say the S more softly that we do. It’s not quite a Z, but almost. Hence when anyone heard the Portuguese talk about Brasil it sounded more like Brazil than Brasil.

End of history lesson.

Well not quite if you think going back to 1986 is history. Brazil, back then anyway, was a classic example of the gap that can occur between rich and poor. We were told that 95 per cent of the populous was poor and the majority of the wealth was in the hands of the remaining 5 per cent. We were billeted by Rotarians, most of who seemed to be in the top 5 per cent, but in some of the smaller centres we were living amongst the 95 per cent. The poor live in appalling hovels called favelas generally made of previously-used corrugated iron. It rained a lot up there; it was near the equator so it was incredibly hot, but it was overcast the whole time. Halley’s Comet was making one of its rare visits to Earth at the time, but there was no chance that we would ever see it.

I recall talking to an ex-pat Englishman who was a senior manager in a jute factory. We were having lunch with the staff in the company dining room and on the wall there was a large sign saying: “Brasil - the country of tomorrow.” This is Brasil’s national slogan: “The country of tomorrow.” The Englishman, who had lived in Brasil for 16 years, said he reckoned this slogan was holding them back. “Tomorrow never comes,” he said “And so the Brasilians continue to reluctantly accept their station in life.”

I asked a well-to-do lawyer I met how come the population didn’t revolt given the appalling gap in living standards. He said revolution is triggered by two conditions, hunger and cold. It certainly wasn’t cold and he said there were plenty of exotic tropical fruits in the jungle so no one went hungry.

The only city we visited which features in the Football World Cup was Manaus. Manaus had two claims to fame; it is home to a magnificent opera house and was known as the murder capital of the world. On a per head basis more people are murdered in Manaus than anywhere else on the planet. We were warned to stay alert as the Brasilians despised Americans - “Americanos Gringos” - and we looked like Americans. We came away unscathed, but I suppose we could have been murdered by the Phantom of the Opera.

And so we are stuck with the conundrum: is it Brasil or Brazil?

Well we managed the switch from Peking to Beijing without too much angst. Beijing apparently aligns more with the true Chinese way of pronouncing their capital city. I’ve often wondered if we shouldn’t anglicise some of our Maori place names to be more commensurate with the way we (mis)pronounce these. It would certainly be a great aid to our increasing numbers of overseas visitors.

We could have Wirewrapper, the Roomarhunger and the Whypoor rivers, Pieartooer, Fenooerpie and even Ayertayerrower.

Before the commencement of a rugby test the All Blacks could do the harker.

All of this provided the bulk of our Maury population agreed.

Mmm…I can just see my old mate Nelson Rangi crossing me off his Christmas card list; even as I write.

“The exact measure of the progress of civilisation is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force.” – George Bancroft

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We sow, we reap and we agonise

"Teenage murderers on the rampage,” screamed the headline. Well it didn’t actually; I just made that up, but it is the sort of banner we might well have got used to over the last few months as more and more young people are severely sentenced for hideous homicides they have committed.

As I looked at the photos of the four people convicted for the senseless slaughter of the Featherston supermarket worker, I couldn’t help but think that a Hollywood movie director would have considered these three men and their lady accomplice were perfectly cast for their roles.

I hope I’m not getting too soft in my old age, but I’m starting to have a good deal of sympathy for our younger generation, many of whom are victims of a society we helped shape after decades of making all the wrong choices. 

They are being brought up in a vastly different world than I was.

It’s easy to say that we never really went along with the progressive policies and the liberal reforms that have insidiously crept into our way of life, and that we were cleverly persuaded that the changes were inevitable. In fact we were swept up in an unstoppable western world-wide movement, even though it was patently clear that many of our cherished traditions were being needlessly abandoned.

Marriage as an institution was thousands of years old, but in the latter part of the twentieth century modernists suddenly decreed that it was irrelevant. The feminist movement arguably led the way, and did so with some justification, but most of their leaders had the resources to cope. Lower down the socio-economic rung all it meant was an excuse for fathers to flee from the responsibilities that went with shared parenthood.

Abolishing censorship for an adult audience was ushered in despite warnings that a younger demographic would soon work out how to access pornographic images with roast busting consequences.

The potential rise of Colin Craig’s Conservative party with its focus on the restoration of the family unit may be an indication that the worm has turned, but if we really expect politicians to lead us back to the promised land we are likely to be sorely disappointed.

We haven’t been told of the backgrounds of Glen Jones’s brutal killers, but it is quite likely they had sordid childhoods which may well have included being brought up in single parent households, living on the edge of poverty. 

Research in Australia, Britain and America as well as New Zealand has revealed that fatherless children are worse off in terms of health, educational attainment, work ethics, income and lifetime wealth.

They are more prone to drug addiction, alcoholism, unemployment, illness, truancy, suicide, poverty and depression.

New Zealand has the developed world’s second highest percentage of single parent families and a UK report shows that compared with the intact married family, serious child abuse is 33 times higher when the mother lives with her boyfriend.

At the frontline of the result of this moral decline are our teachers, battling to control classes that contain stroppy undisciplined kids, many of whom have no respect at all for their elders. Typical response is to suspend the miscreants and leave them to roam the streets with idle hands. Thirty four per cent of teaching graduates apparently leave the profession within two years.

The statistics get worse. Apart from the decline in marriages and the rise in the divorce and separation rates the incidence of youth suicide in New Zealand is seven times higher than in 1968 and we perform about the same number of abortions as we import people through immigration channels to make up the numbers.

Of course the great majority of people overcome disadvantaged upbringings and many use the handicap as a springboard for achievement. And anyway, by and large most aspects of life have improved markedly over the last fifty years. There used to be a lot more hypocrisy around, even in the marriage vows, and much of what was wrong was never disclosed or was swept under the carpet.

But there must also be dissatisfaction that the trickle-down advantages of free market economics have never eventuated. Blatantly promoted desirable in-your-face products will constantly frustrate those who cannot partake because of the inequities in society.

Throwaway consumer items are a testament of our times and some of our young people will have been similarly discarded, leaving them with a feeling of total worthlessness.

Waiting in the wings is the drug culture, with a liberal element of society prepared to experiment with legalisation and once tightly-controlled alcohol products now readily accessible. In the end an institution that provides a warm bed, three meals a day and the security of a disciplined routine, may be appealing.

But it’s a murderous path to embark upon.

“We desperately need in this country to provide the inspiration and leadership to aspire to be a decent society…in the end our future as a nation will not and cannot and should not depend upon government structure, but rather on the resolve and character on each one of us as a citizen.” - Judge Mick Brown

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Reflecting on the longest day

Seventy years ago, on June the 6th 1944, the tide of the Second World War was about to turn. The allied invasion known as D-day started on the beaches of France and advanced all the way to Berlin where the Germans surrendered eleven months later. The war in Europe was over.

It was a clever and well planned campaign, but its success or otherwise was never a foregone conclusion. The Germans were aware that it was to happen, but wrongly assumed the enemy forces would land at Pas de Calais, which was just 45 km from the British coast. Rommel and his men encamped there and Allied bombers kept shelling the area as though preparing it for an invasion. False radar reports were issued to confirm this destination and dummy landing craft and rubber tanks were assembled to complete the illusion.

In the event the troops took the circuitous route to Normandy and landed at a beach the Americans would call Omaha. The weather was atrocious; convincing the German’s that the event would be postponed. Rommel even went back home to celebrate his wife’s birthday. 150,000 men landed on that June dawn, mostly American and British, but also Canadians, French, Polish and Dutch and although by the end of the day thousands would be dead, they succeeded in establishing a beachhead and the rest, as they say, is history.

The logistics needed to mount the invasion were monumental. Across the channel from the landing points England had been turned into a huge armed camp. 163 new airfields, 2 million tons of supplies, 1500 tanks and 5000 boats. The Luftwaffe’s 183 fighter planes that day faced 11,000 Allied aircraft.

D-day had been promised to Stalin as early as 1942. His country was under an interminable siege from Germany’s eastern front. By mid 1942 more than 150 German divisions had overrun the Soviet Union to a depth of 1500 km, and the casualties were horrendous. However President Roosevelt wisely decided that America and Britain were not ready in 1942 or even 1943. To placate Stalin he offered American lend-lease aid which eventually caused Stalin to fulminate that the war was being fought with American money and American machines, but with Russian lives.

There was more than a grain of truth in this claim. For every American who gave his life in World War II, some 59 Russians died. This is not to deny the American lives lost. Over 400,000 Americans perished, but Roosevelt’s shrewd delaying of the D-day assault meant the Allies won the war and America won the peace.

Americans then assumed the role of peacekeeper. They saw themselves as the ones who rode to the rescue, vanquished the enemy, got hailed as liberators, reinstated democracy as they envisaged it and then went home, certain they had left the place better than they had found it.

The vision is now fading and the well-intentioned Americans are confused. The memory of D-day has provided seventy years of inspiration, but the jubilant people of Paris have long since vanished; replaced by divided Koreans, victorious Viet-Cong, disillusioned Iraqis, dazed Afghanis and fuming Syrians. The US will have found that might, once expressed as “shock and awe”, is no match against ideology.

In the meantime on the home front the money has all gone, wiped out in an economy brought to its knees by a corrupt banking system that eventually morphed into the global financial crisis that is still unresolved. America’s ability to ride to the rescue is now constrained by cost overruns.

Their lame-duck president looks timid as he procrastinates over Iran, fails to act when the Syrian regime oversteps a red line that he himself had set and watches helplessly as the Ukraine stumbles from crisis to crisis. His military strategy relies on drones that indiscriminately assassinate all in their wake and as a result the democracy that once boasted a justice system that demanded a fair trial before retribution now seems irreparably compromised.

Even post-war America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, was far from perfect. They had few civil rights for a sizable segment of the population, they were about to usher in the despicable McCarthy era and their top law enforcement officer was found to have a surprising number of skeletons in his closet apparently alongside his own covert wardrobe of women’s clothing.

But they proceeded to fly us to the moon and made huge strides in the field of medical science and technology. After the war America’s enlightened Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe and Franklin Roosevelt’s wily management of D-day meant Americans emerged as the saviours of humanity. They were given the mantle of international leadership and thus for a time became a repository for the invested wealth of the world.

History records however that it was the Russians who largely paid the price; perhaps they are now demanding their moment in the sun.

“More than an end to war, we want an end to the beginning of all wars.” 
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

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