KEY POINTS:
In work lunchrooms around the country you will not have to look too far to see an overweight person having lunch.
If that person is a mature person, the lunch often will largely comprise a salad of some description, popularly thought of as a "healthy" food. If you had no other information, but were aware that eating can lead to obesity, you would have to conclude that the cause of the obesity was the consumption of salad.
About once a week I turn up to lunch in our staffroom with a pie, sausage roll and wedge chips. The chips have a spicy, oily coating and are particularly tasty, as are the pie and roll. As a food scientist, what I eat at work is constantly scrutinised.
My pie, roll, and chip habit is often greeted by colleagues with jokes at my expense, usually focused around the word "unhealthy".
If I were to follow the pie, roll, and chips regime every day at work and maintain my purportedly healthy body mass index of 24.3, my colleagues - again with no other source of information - would have to conclude that this "unhealthy" food was responsible for my socially acceptable BMI.
Now, eating a pie, sausage roll and chips every work day for lunch is not for me, but if I did could I maintain my BMI at 24.3 without resorting to more physical exercise? The answer is yes, because what I ate at other meals could compensate for my gastronomic excess at lunch.
In short, I could easily organise a balanced diet. Plainly, the said obese person is overcompensating outside work with high-calorie foods.
My point is that excepting specific food allergies and intolerances, there are no healthy and unhealthy (junk) foods, just healthy and unhealthy diets. Another way of looking at this is to distinguish between weather and climate. The weather is what you see when you look out of the window (food), while climate (diet) is the long-term average of weather (food).
The remarkable fact is that this quite obvious distinction between food and diet is ignored in the debate that swirls around the so-called obesity epidemic.
Through planned changes to school regulations, the National Administration Guidelines, "unhealthy" foods, such as foods with high fat, sugar and salt content, will not be allowed to be sold in school cafeterias, in the belief that bans will help to solve the obesity epidemic and its attendant woes.
If I were a parent of school-age children, I would feel that bans like this - however well intentioned - are a violation of parental rights. In winter months particularly, a parent might welcome the idea of their child having a hot pie and chips for lunch, having sorted out the child's diet at other meals in the day.
These ban campaigns are a political manifestation of the confusion between food and diet. The focus on food extends to ingredients used in commercially prepared foods, particularly to the claims made on labels.
A staggering number of prepared foods in supermarkets claim to be made from "all natural ingredients" and contain "no additives or preservatives".
Sadly, food manufacturers have largely bought into the dogma that "natural" is good, while "additives", "preservatives" and "GE" are bad.
Never mind that there is no evidence for these beliefs. Manufacturers make these claims to ensure they are politically correct in the eyes of the food zealots, and, crucially, in the eyes of the buying public, who are bombarded with the supposed evils of these "bad" ingredients.
Collectively, these claims have become a Big Lie, with an inertia that is hard to impede. But who can blame the manufacturers? They want to remain in business, and if that involves supporting the Dogma Of The Day then so be it.
Nobody gets sick or dies from additives, preservatives or GE-sourced ingredients in New Zealand. But plenty of people get sick and some die from pathogenic microbes in food.
If the activists want to get excited about something real, I suggest they pick on food hygiene. Additives are simply not an issue, just as individual foods are not an issue. Diet is what matters.
In 1564 the famed Swiss physician Paracelsus proposed that "Everything is poison. There is nothing without poison. Only the dose makes a thing not a poison. For example, every food and every drink, if taken beyond its dose, is poison." This observation is as valid today as it was in 1564.
Eat, drink and be merry; and have everything in moderation (including moderation).
* Dr Owen Young is associate professor of Food Science, in the Division of Applied Sciences, Auckland University of Technology.
