Andrew Lansley has a cheek criticising Jamie's hard work in improving School Meals

See this Guardian article. When Jamie began his campaigning work to improve school meals, a frequent substance that appeared on the children's lunch plates was a highly-salted, processed parody of food called Turkey Twizzlers: devoid of real nutrition and harming children's health by its high salt content, a major cause of obesity in children, it could have been doing children nothing but harm. - Jamie worked indefatigably to put an end to this national scandal and deserves unstinted praise, not criticism, for his success in improving school dinner provision and drawing attention to lack of cookery teaching, etc. - Shame on Andrew Lansley!

I've been watching "Jamie Saves Our Bacon" on Channel 4 - a powerful programme

I've been watching Jamie on Channel 4 - http://www.channel4.com/food/on-tv/jamie-oliver/jamie-saves-our-bacon/index.html - This was a powerful plea for pigs to be farmed more compassionately. Currently many pigs in Europe, particularly the sows, endure very long periods of cruel restriction, unnaturally confined in uncomfortable pens.

If you click on the link and learn more about the matter, I feel sure you will be moved to do what you can to ameliorate the lives of the pigs. Jamie is asking us to buy British pork, because pig welfare standards here are higher, and he is asking us to buy shoulder of pork, belly of pork and pork neck fillet, because buying these cuts, which at present are less popular cuts, will help hard-pressed British pig farmers. There are recipes for these cuts on the Channel 4 website.

He is also pressing the powers that be to put better labelling on packs of pork so that consumers can be sure about the country of origin of the pork and in particular, the bacon.

(He also showed us a distasteful practice of some pork dealers - that of injecting water and phosphates into pig meat, so that you could be buying a pack of pork that is 89% pork and 11% water and phosphates...)o: - Include me out of pork like that!)

Jamie Oliver is being criticised over the level of salt in his tomato sauce.

Jamie Oliver's Pasta Sauce is too salty
Article in the Guardian

The Guardian reports that, "Graham MacGregor, professor of cardiovascular medicine at St George's Hospital in south London, said he was shocked by the figures. MacGregor, who chairs Consensus Action on Salt and Health, said Oliver's tomato, olive and garlic sauce contained 20% more salt than Atlantic seawater."

I'm disappointed that Jamie has not ensured that the sauces with his name on are not lower in salt than other sauces. - I've just been looking on the internet and found a very low salt tomato sauce on this webpage: http://www.westcountryspice.com/products.htm

Here is why you need to protect your child from salt and salty food:
Children and Obesity

Salt levels listed in the Guardian article:

"Jamie Oliver's pasta sauce 3g/100g

Kelloggs cornflakes 1.75g/100g

Sharwood's Tikka Masala Cooking Sauce 1.65g/100g

Heinz baked beans 1.3g/100g

Hovis Farmhouse white loaf 1.25g/100g

Goodfella's Cheesy Pizza 1.1g/100g

Bernard Matthews Turkey Twizzler 0.925g/100g (new recipe) or 1.24g/100g (old recipe)

McDonald's Big Mac 0.9g/100g

Covent Garden Food Co. plum tomato and marscapone soup 0.4g/100g"

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, angina, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

I watched Jamie Oliver's Channel 4 show: "Eat to Save Your Life" last night and found it, like the curate's egg, 'good in parts'...

I admire Jamie Oliver's campaigning, and in this programme he was right to draw attention to the poor quality and undesirable ingredients of much processed food and ready meals, and right to urge people to eat wholefoods and to cook from fresh ingredients.

But the nutritionist on the programme gave the usual misinformation that reducing calorie intake is the way to reduce or prevent obesity. - There is not a shred of evidence to support this claim. - It is categorically untrue. - As far as food intake is concerned, to reduce or prevent obesity it is chiefly necessary to minimise sodium/salt intake and to eat plenty of fruit and vegetables. This is because obesity is caused by fluid retention, not by overeating. It is also necessary to avoid dieting; dieting is a major cause of weight gain and ill-health...)o:

Prescription drugs were not mentioned at all in the programme, and yet they are overwhelmingly the cause of the most severe cases of morbid obesity. - People need to be warned to avoid prescription drugs as far as they possibly can. They cause far more harm than good...)o:

You can read about fluid retention, and about fat retention, and about pharmaceutical junk and the harm it does, and about salt sensitivity and the groups of people vulnerable to salt - and much more - on my website. - And I'm not selling anything...(o:

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/steroids.html

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/ami.html

vulnerable groups

How to Lose weight!

Children and Obesity

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

See Sodium in foods and

Associated health conditions and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

Wider implications of the flawed theory that excess calorie intake causes obesity

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

All hens' eggs are due to be free-range within two years

All eggs to be free-range within two years

Extract from the Telegraph:

"Sainsbury's, the Co-op and Morrisons have all agreed to ban eggs from caged birds while Marks & Spencer and Waitrose already sell only free-range eggs.

All products containing egg will also use free-range varieties.

The chains will phase out battery hen eggs over the next two years, before an EU ban on battery cages due to come into effect in 2012.

Asda and Tesco have not yet followed suit, but have cut back shelf space given to battery hen eggs.

In Britain, "enriched cages", which are larger and have a perch, nest and litter, will still be legal but Germany will also ban these cages.

The move comes as the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver launches a campaign to persuade consumers to demand better welfare for hens.

He examines the poultry industry in a one-off television programme, Jamie's Fowl Dinners, in which he shows a series of films and interviews explaining the brutal living conditions of battery chickens that are killed for meat.

Sainsbury's, which Oliver promotes, said it was the first major supermarket to announce a ban on battery hen eggs and was expected to end the sale of all such eggs by next year.

Morrisons also plans to stop selling eggs from caged hens by 2010. A spokesman said: "We see animal welfare as an extremely important factor when sourcing produce - that's why we have taken action on eggs.""

TV chefs, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver, begin a campaign against the cruelty of intensive chicken production

The shameful price of cheap food

Extract from the Telegraph:

"We are living in the era of cheap food, when you can pick up a chicken in the supermarket for less than the price of a pint of beer. But there is a hidden cost: of the 850 million birds reared in Britain every year, only five per cent have had anything approaching a comfortable life. The vast majority are intensively reared, in prison-camp environments.

Now two of our most celebrated campaigning chefs, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver, are about to try to change our minds, and to ensure that the 25 kilos of chicken meat we each consume a year have come from birds that were decently treated.

Starting next week, Channel 4 is devoting a season of programmes to the nation's eating habits. There will be a one-off Oliver special - Jamie's Fowl Dinners - in which he demonstrates the realities of industrial chicken production, while Fearnley-Whittingstall's aptly titled Hugh's Chicken Run will follow his attempts to set up an intensive farm - in the course of which he is reduced to tears.

The way chickens are reared provides an insight into the intensive techniques used to satisfy our demand for cut-price meat and vegetables. In this world, a bird that will feed a family of five can be raised in a mere 39 days, when before the Second World War it would have needed around 20 weeks to reach the same weight. Modern methods see 40,000 birds packed into one artificially lit barn, reeking to such an extent that if the ventilation system failed they would be gassed by their own droppings. Each bird inhabits a space smaller than a piece of A4 paper, and most will have been de-clawed and de-beaked to prevent them damaging their neighbours. To encourage them to feed continuously, they are given only one hour of darkness in each day. They will never experience natural light or see a blade of grass.

These birds are meant to fatten quickly, so exercise is undesirable. Low light levels keep them drowsy, but as they grow they become so densely packed in as to find movement impossible. Even if they had the notion to try to make it to an open door, they grow so fat that their legs often become useless. During the process of catching and transportation, tens of thousands may die, as they are packed together even more tightly than in their sheds. (Chickens need three times as much air as human beings for their size: in a lorry, they may get almost none.)"

A good news story about healthy hot meals in some rural schools: - set up by Tim Crabtree and Local Food Links

Recipe for success

Extract from Guardian article:

"As Dorset this week stages a celebration of local food - a reflection of the growing interest in local, organic produce that began with the rise of farmers' markets - the man who helped kick-start this trend has turned to something more significant than catering for the rural rich.

Tim Crabtree set up the West Dorset Food and Land Trust, which initiated the farmers' markets, but now runs Local Food Links, a community-benefit society that cooks and delivers hot meals to schools around Bridport.

Crabtree says the impetus behind Bridport's LFL was that while visitors and retired people could afford to shop at farmers' markets, ordinary working people struggled. "We live in a low-wage economy, and so our remit has been to address the fact that local and organic food has become an expensive niche market."

Almost two years ago, in response to the Jamie's School Dinners series on TV, the government announced that all schools should serve hot meals by September 2008. But amid all the fuss about "scrotum burgers" and Turkey Twizzlers, one fact was overlooked: 25 years ago, under the last Conservative government, all the primary schools in Dorset got rid of their kitchens.

The county council thought microwavable ready meals would be the only option if schools were to reinstate hot lunches, but companies refused to tender for the job, saying they were unable to do it profitably due to the large number of small schools spread across such a rural area.

LFL stepped in, initially offering hot, freshly made soup to two primary schools. Ruth Clench, headmistress of Bridport county primary school, says: "There was a really good take-up, and a superb part of the experiment was that some of the children helped make it. That persuaded other children to try it." Laura Wood, whose daughters attend the school, says: "Before, my kids had only ever eaten Heinz tomato soup, and it encouraged me to make soup at home, too."

Encouraged by the success of the soup kitchen, Crabtree expanded the operation in April to provide hot meals two days a week to eight schools. He hopes that by Easter next year all eight schools will be supplied with hot meals five days a week. The target is 95,000 meals, which would take the area to the current national average of a 40% take-up.

What has helped in getting children to accept a wide range of vegetables is that they get involved in choosing them. LFL holds tasting sessions for the children and their parents, pays close attention to their comments, and also sneaks extra vegetables into their meals - for instance, by pureeing butternut squash and adding it to tomato sauce (a Jamie Oliver recipe)."

Lose weight and improve your health in many ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! Go on! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

vulnerable groups

How to Lose weight!

Children and Obesity

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection
See Sodium in foods and

Associated health conditions and

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/story.html - my 'political' page

I can be contacted via my website if you need my further help. My help is free.

British School Dinners and Jamie Oliver

Three Cheers for Jamie Oliver! - for drawing attention to the scandalously poor quality of so many school dinners in Britain - containing loads of salt (main cause of obesity in children) and low-grade fat, lots of sugar (damages teeth) and very lacking in fresh fruit and vegetables. He shamed the politicians and others into taking action to improve the meals and to spend more time and money on them. The changes he brought about will have immeasurably improved the health, behaviour and school performance of all the children who are now eating real food at dinnertime, instead of junk like 'turkey twizzlers'...

Three boos for all the dinosaurs who are still churning out the advice that obese people should simply eat less and exercise more! - After decades of this advice, the incidence of obesity is still rising, even though most obese folk are restricting their food intake most of the time. - You'd think the 'experts' would realise by now that the advice simply does not work...

Think about it: - it's only fat people who get told that they are over-eating and should eat less. - Do the slim people who eat massive amounts, often of high calorie food, ever get told they are eating too much and should eat less? - No they don't!

Obesity is not caused by over-eating and cannot be 'cured' by under-eating.

Obesity is not caused by eating too much. - It is caused/initiated by fluid retention. - Dieting is potentially harmful.
Lose weight by eating less salt! - Go on! - Try it! - See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/ (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)