Get them young to keep them healthy

Hull is familiar with scurvy from the tales of epic voyages its mariners once undertook without packing vitamin C in the shape of lemons and limes.

But surely everyone knows how to avoid this disease these days? Apparently not. Two severe cases of scurvy have been treated in Hull recently.

This startling fact was reported this week by Professor Stephen Atkin, of Hull York Medical School. But the greater peril from not eating a healthy balanced diet is obesity. Professor Atkin says he and a local paediatrician are now seeing youngsters weighing 135 kg. That's over 21 stones.

"Obesity is the greatest global threat we face," he said. "It will bankrupt the NHS." Currently, ten per cent of children are obese and this will increase to a third by 2050. The grossly overweight are more likely to develop type two diabetes, stroke and heart disease, which cost the health service 3.5bn a year and cause of 18m sick days.

The Yorkshire and Humber NHS region does not score well in the national sickness charts and Profesor Atkin is one of those whose job it is to try and turn things round. But for every pound spent by the Government and the World Health Organisation to promote healthy eating, the food industry spends 500.

The Government and its agencies have come up with an assortment of schemes – two million children in 18,000 schools have been getting free fruit and veg since 2004. But it turns out not even this strategy is

as clear as it seems.

Professor Atkin was speaking at a conference at the Stockbridge Technology Centre at Cawood to discuss ways of increasing fruit and veg consumption. The "five a day" message was well recognised by the public, but this is now being soft-pedalled. Professor Atkin said its replacements did not carry the potency of McDonald's fast food advertising come-on – "I'm lovin' it". James McCoy of YouGov research said 39 per cent of people are influenced in their choices by television cookery programmes against eleven per cent influenced by official messages.

This lack of focus may partly be because no-one is sure why fruit and veg are good for you, a fact that probably comes as a surprise to most of us. Professor Atkin explained they knew how vitamins worked in the test tube, but not how they worked in the body.

Dr Kirsten Brandt, a senior lecturer in Newcastle University's School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, said our knowledge about the extent and causes of the health benefits of fruit and veg were "extremely vague".

She said: "If there is an effect we don't know the cause. This why five a day is vague and inconsistent."

But it's not just what you put into your mouth which matters in this debate. A survey in Hull revealed the greatest impediments to eating healthily was washing up afterwards.

Many families have become accustomed to eating from their laps in front of the television and some do not even have a dining table. That's not something that the law can alter and Lord Heseltine – the former Conservative deputy prime minister – pointed out to the conference central government's impotence in this area.

"How do you change human behaviour back from the television to the table?" asked Lord Heseltine. Although he agreed obesity was now an issue for politicians as well as for doctors, he believed trying bring about change in people's choice of food was "'spitting in the wind... If people are eating more than they should, that can't be changed by the private sector. And I wouldn't want to be the politician who tries to address this.

"What we are talking about is on the margin – the habit of 'just another one'. We have to get people to exert personal discipline."

Get them young is a message everyone signs up to. Clare Harper of the Schools Food Trust reported a substantial move towards healthy food in school canteens. But she added nearly a quarter of what the children put on their plate is wasted. Guess which are the bits they leave?

The recommended fruit and veg intake is 400g a day, but 250g is the actual figure. Nigel Jenney, the chief executive of the Fresh Produce Consortium sounded an exasperated note about what he was hearing at the conference.

"While we argue about the detail, the processed food makers are taking over our market." His big bugbear: why exclude potatoes from the five-a-day?

A third of our is fruit and veg sourced from the UK, a third from Europe and and third from the rest of the world.

Some schoolchildren however are ahead of the game and are doing the sourcing for themselves. In Halifax a couple of days ago, celebrity chef Brian Turner presented Food for Life Partnership Awards to northern schools. To meet the standard, a school must have a cooking club and pupils must cook with and eat the produce from their own growing area. Parents and the wider community must be involved in food education via food-themed events. Of the 13 schools receiving awards, six were from Yorkshire. So no mixed message there.

CW 24/4/10