The Royal Society for Public Health have recommended that food and drinks should be labelled not only with the calories, fat, sugar etc within the food, but also how much exercise it would take to burn off the calories consumed by eating it. The theory behind this proposition is that people underestimate how long it takes to burn off calories. For instance, it would take an hour of running at a steady pace to burn off the calories in the average sandwich meal deal from a supermarket. While I understand these suggestions are a measure to try and put food into context within every day lives, to help people make better choices, I believe there are some fundamental issues with the idea.
First and foremost, I feel this would promote the idea that we need to burn off all of the calories we consume each day through exercise. While this is not incorrect, it leaves out some crucial information. Every day our bodies require a certain amount of energy to keep going about their business: to get out of bed, to walk, to breathe, to pump blood around the body and to the heart. The amount of energy needed depends on the person; their build, their genetics and their daily physical activity (which includes exercise). It is known as the Basal Metabolic Rate, BMR, i.e. the rate at which the body uses energy to maintain everyday functions. This energy must come from somewhere. To maintain a steady weight, a person must consume the same level of energy (calories) as their individual BMR, in the form of food. If not from food, it can come from energy stores in the body i.e. fat stores. This is therefore the principal of trying to lose weight; consume less energy than your BMR and your body should start to use up its fat stores.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am all for everyone doing a little more exercise and combining this with a healthy eating lifestyle but I don’t feel that promoting the attitude of “Oh I can eat that because I’m going to the gym later” is the answer to this. Compared to a few years ago, the UK population is far more aware of other things they should watch out for in their food; fat and saturated fat, sugars and salt, not just the calories. Obviously calorific content is related to the levels of fat and sugar in a food but we shouldn’t be reverting back to the days of low-carb, low-fat calorie counting diets which left the nation piling the pounds back on after a couple of months. With the help of social media and the internet, dieting and healthy eating has moved on since then, let’s embrace that.
Back to BMR for a second as it helps explain my biggest frustration with this recent labelling advice. Should this go ahead, imagine a label that states you need to walk 48 minutes to burn off a muffin. You, as an average consumer cannot take that information as absolute. There are far too many caveats. As BMR changes depending on the person, the number of calories burned through different types of exercise changes too. As a rule of thumb the heavier you are, the more calories you will burn through exercise. Therefore I ask the Royal Society for Public Health who they propose to base the new labelling scheme on? Men or Women? Healthy, average individuals who are not representative of the demographic that would pay more attention to the label as they are looking to lose weight? Or would it be based on the growing number of obese people in the UK, the people the government would be trying to help which such a scheme? It would most likely be based on a female of ideal weight, consuming the recommended 2000 calories a day and performing the recommended 20 minutes of exercise a day. Either way, the scheme would be be useless for rest of the population.
I can’t claim to have the winning formula to help Brits make better food choices, but I do believe this idea to be completely futile. I also passionately believe that the best way forward is a culture of healthy eating combined with exercise, not one that promotes exercise as the solution to binging on the sugary snack items this scheme would quite obviously focus on. I know this would take time and that nothing happens over night but my recent research at work into dieting and healthy eating trends in the UK and the US shows a movement away from fad diets and towards the promotion of general lifestyle changes that could bring about long term solutions. So what would I say in the meantime? If the government really wanted quick results, why not follow in the foot steps of the tobacco industry? Label all of our food with harrowing images of the effects of poor eating habits; dental cavities from sugary foods, limb amputations as a result of diabetes and clogged arteries from high cholesterol. It may sound extreme but unless we change peoples attitudes to food, that is going to be our only option a couple of generations down the line.
Interested in calculating your BMR? Try this website. Bare in mind that this is a guide to show you how much energy your body needs without carrying out any exercise that day and may not be entirely accurate as it does not take into account your health status, i.e. health conditions or infections; your body has to work harder with these bothering it.
thefoodstudent 