Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food | Hacker News Reader

Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food

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56 pointshachiya24 comments

I found this rant a bit vapid - you'll find more usable information here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1041452 (or read Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories).

I think Oliver clearly identifies a problem (and quite passionately believes in what he says), but the solution seems squishy - "fighting obesity" and "education" are great ideas but when you empower people with bad ideas that's probably worse than useless. Besides, the problem isn't educating the kids but the parents.

Besides, the problem isn't educating the kids but the parents.

In one episode of Jamie's School Dinners some parents were giving junk food through the schoolyard gate to their children when Jamie had convinced the school to start serving healthy and delicious meals. His Don Quixote like crusade to improve the food culture of the English is worthy of praise and makes him much more remarkable than most TV chefs.

That parents do that to their kids is sad on so many levels. :-(

A very impressive and passionate presentation. Jamie's use of shock value is very effective and probably necessary to get people to listen and take action.

Have you seen his Chicken special? The one where he kills a few dozen cute fluffy yellow chickens in front of a live audience? That show was full of shock value, all aimed at getting people to realise just what happens in the industry, and also where your chicken dinner comes from

I'm curious what a better nutrition labeling system would look like. I think each country has a different system. It would stand to reason that at least a few have something better than the US system.

Sugar = fat.

A lot of food says 0% fat, when the ultimate result of all that sugar is essentially fat.

Sugar != fat in terms of the content of food. If something has zero fat but 400 calories, then it's still bad for you but in a different way. Either way, it's clearly labeled.

The problem is that people don't know how to interpret the labels. Better education would help with that. Weight watchers, for example, has their points formula which boils down the calories, fat, and fiber values into a single number that is easier to understand. Some food packages even include the WW points number -- but it wouldn't be very accurate or scientific to mandate that sort of thing.

I can't recall any other sources other than that Robert Lustig talk, but from what I've understood you gain more fat by metabolizing sugar than by actually consuming fat.

I understand that's the case as well. A lot of low-carb diets, such at Atkins, allow you to eat as much fat as you want and you'll still lose weight. Dietary fat is bad for your cardiovascular system, though.

The food that contains 0% fat doesn't contain any fat. That's actually useful information. If people think that 0% fat foods are automatically good for them, that's an education problem not a labeling problem.

Dietary fat is bad for your cardiovascular system, though.

As cwan mentioned earlier, read Taubes.

That does not appear to be true. For instance, here is Walter Willett, chair of the department of nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health:

From many kinds of studies conducted over years, we are quite confident now that a calorie from fat will cause a similar amount of weight gain as a calorie from carbohydrate. There are some interesting questions about whether eating carbohydrate calories versus fat calories will make you eat more calories, but based on what you put into your mouth, it's pretty clear that the source of the calories is really not important.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1822118,00.ht...

Wouldn't the calories label on the food include both calories from both fat and carbs? So this is all moot to the discussion at hand.

That article is talking "carbs vs. fat." Lustig is talking "sugar vs. everything else," and the key to the sugar-obesity link isn't in calorie quantities, but in how it affects future appetite and preferences. After drinking a soda, you will eat _more_ on average than someone on an empty stomach, even though you've just downed ~45 grams of sugar. It's the same reason why you can enjoy terrible bar food once you're drunk.

Yes, sugar indeed != fat. When you do eat sugar - it is your body's first choice for energy. This means that any fat you eat gets stored for later consumption... which will be never cuz most of us eat way too much sugar anyway.

I have a startup idea surrounding this that I think could be killer. I'm working full-time (on another startup) but I'm applying to YC anyway because I think it would be an easy hack with huge benefits and the possibility of making a lot of wealth. If you're interested I'm looking for a cofounder -- email me at daniellefong at daniellefong dot com.

Have you seen Joel Fuhrman's ANDI rating system? It's being used at Whole Foods.

http://www.examiner.com/x-672-Disease-Prevention-Examiner~y2...

What I get out of these "boiled-down" systems is that I should just eat a vitamin pill and some cardboard. Low sugar, low fat, high nutrients.

Go for it.

There might be a lot you're missing. Nutrition is hideously complex, but since we're evolved to eat whole foods and there are a lot of bioactive enzymes and or compounds that aren't well known or in vitamin pills you could be missing out on something crucial.

That would be my point.

And so any labeling system needs to emphasize that it is incomplete, and that vitamins/minerals that we've located might simply be the markers of good food: not the sole constituents. It's like correlations versus causality.

Yeah I think the ANDI system is fundamentally flawed and there's a much better way to do things.

Where I am, all nutrition labels contain the amounts per 100g/100ml (for comparison with other items) and per "serving" (for knowing how much you typically get).

The problem though is that serving sizes typically don't reflect how much you actually eat, especially for food that's bad for you. A serving of chips is usually a fistful, a serving of chocolate is not the entire bar, etc. Overall the system is ok, but there's room for improvement.

On the other hand, nutrition labels are such a small problem, the big problem is that people eat too fucking much, and no label in the world are going to stop them from doing so.

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