Health Challenge: Convert your body to a Biscuit-Free Zone!

You really can improve your health by giving up eating biscuits. Just consider their many unhealthy ingredients: transfats/hydrogenated vegetable oil/partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, salt (yes, even sweet biscuits usually contain a lot of salt!), sugar, wheat flour. If you are overweight and you eat biscuits then I'm sure you know that the biscuits are contributing to the excess weight. But you may not know that the transfats in biscuits do not just contribute to overweight, they are actually toxic to the body because they do not exist in natural food and so your body cannot metabolise them in a normal way. They are added for commercial reasons to extend the shelf life of the biscuits. Sadly they do not extend the life of the people who eat the biscuits...)o:- Go on! - Try giving up biscuits! - You'll feel better for it!

Artificial transfats damage our sewers as well as our health!

Artificial transfats damage our sewers as well as our health! Read this excellent Guardian blog article.

Artificial transfats are such an insidious poison. They shouldn't be there in food, of course. They are not necessary for our bodies; they are damaging, of course, and the cumulative damage results in degenerative disease. This degeneration causes personal suffering and public expense in dealing with the avoidable illnesses that result. It's interesting to read in this article how as well as clogging up our blood vessels, these toxins also clog up our sewers and cause nuisance and expense there too.

Are you wondering why poisons are added to food products like biscuits, cakes, fast foods, processed meals, takeaways, etc? It's because transfats increase the shelf life of these products, and thereby add to the profits of the Food Industry. And the government (and, indeed previous administrations too) favours food company profits over public health. - It's the same with salt added to manufactured food, but that's another shameful story.

Poisoned for Profit: Toxic Transfats still Allowed in UK Food

The Independent has a feature article about the continued scandal of UK food manufacturers being allowed to add transfats to their food products. "Within many shop-bought pastries, cakes, doughnuts, crisps, processed meats, soups, frozen food, biscuits, chocolate bars, breakfast cereals and takeaway food, exists an ingredient that the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared toxic in 2009. It's hydrogenated vegetable oil, otherwise known as trans fat, and it doesn't even have to appear clearly on ingredients labels. Have a look, and you might find it called 'shortening', or 'hydrogenated fats', maybe 'hydrogenated vegetable oils' (HVOs), perhaps 'partially hydrogenated vegetable oils' (PHVOs), or... not mentioned at all. " Outrageous, isn't it?

Trans fats are useful to the food industry principally because they increase the shelf life of the harmful products they sell as food. But trans fats are not food. They are manufactured substances that do not exist in real food. - Real food, i.e. the natural fresh food that's good for you, tends to go off once it has been kept too long and is no longer fresh. Food that can be stored 'safely' for very long periods of time by means of highly unnatural processes is not really 'safe' at all. - If even germs and other microbes turn up their little noses at it, it should have no place in our stomachs! Since trans fats cannot be metabolised by the body they can only get up to a heap of no good once we've eaten them.

Why are consumers being sold this garbage then? With the health damage (individual suffering and national financial cost of treating the diseases caused) that inevitably accompanies it? Thousands of people dying before their time? - It's pretty clear we have Andrew Lansley, the Dark Lord of UnHealth, to thank for this lamentable state of affairs. His evident conflict of interests leads him to favour food company profits over the health of the citizenry (his ostensible job). Some other countries have managed to Ban Transfats from food despite the blandishments of big business. Our country should do the same. If you want to sign a petition about it you can do so here: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/330 though to be honest, I don't think it will do any good.

NICE is calling for a a ban on Trans-Fats in foods, and further reductions in Salt Content

See BBC News report. As well as a ban on trans-fats and further reduction in added salt, NICE is also pressing for reductions in saturated fat content, but here I part company with NICE.

Many consumers would welcome a ban on trans fats; they have been added to food products to benefit commercial interests, not because of any consumer demand. (See article.) And many consumers would also welcome a ban on adding salt to food products, but there is strong resistance by the food industry to make substantial cuts in the salt levels of their products. This is because the high levels of salt in processed foods have engineered a very strong taste for salt in a large number of their customers. Neither trans fats nor salt were present in other than very small quantities in the diets of our ancestors, stone age men and women, and the nearer our diets approximate today to those of our ancestors, the healthier for us, since it was on their diet that our species evolved and for which it is best suited.

But saturated fats are a different matter entirely. The hunter-gatherers ate saturated fat and our bodies evolved on it. Modern research studies indicate that saturated fats are not causing heart disease. It is a great pity that the people advising us to eat less saturated fat are not reading the up-to-date research findings on this matter. We do not need to cut down on saturated fats; they are good for us. See Dr Briffa's blogpost about this.

Chips 'can increase the risk of infertility'. (So can obesity and salt/sodium intake.)

Chips 'can increase the risk of infertility'. - Worth reading! - It's the transfats, apparently, that cause this increased risk, but read further details in the report.

Being obese also increases the risk of infertility. And since obesity is caused by salt sensitivity, any woman wanting to increase her fertility would benefit from reducing her salt/sodium intake. - See aspects of health that are affected by salt sensitivity and salt intake

Also see information for pregnant mothers

'Hidden' fats - Transfats - removed from foods in UK - but still not completely...)o:

Report can be accessed on this page http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6058416.stm

Good news as far as it goes - but what a shame that transfats have not yet been banned completely from food. You can read some information about transfats on http://www.bantransfats.com/

Should Governments ban/regulate transfats in manufactured food?

Should Governments ban/regulate transfats in manufactured food?

If you'd like to see info/evidence about transfats, have a look at http://www.tfx.org.uk/ and http://www.bantransfats.com/abouttransfat.html