Barry Vaughan, of Townsend Close, West Alvington, writes:
In some review of local MP Dr Sarah Wollaston’s smug, celebratory self-acclaim in respect of further arbitrary governmental mass medication of people, the sugar tax, then by merging in with the Budget the exercise has sidelined parliamentary scrutiny and public consensus, resulting in more indirectly coerced taxes levied against mineral water companies, which for decades have normally enhanced their drinks with wholesome sugar, instead of inferior chemical substitutes, the safety of which are still to be proven.
Recent decades of food history reveals a surreal list of foods that at some time or other have been attacked owing to the muddled disapproval of the ‘skin and bone brigade’ and the arrogant medical tin gods, whose own track records are littered with dogmatic blunders. Now it is the energy-giving, body-building carbohydrate sugar that is being demonised.
For decades our children have been drinking quite safely lemonades during their breaks, as well as for outings, picnics, birthday parties etc, but now this country – anti-child as usual – finds the modern know-alls treading the same cynical path as Thatcher the milk snatcher, who stopped our children’s free, nutritious school break-time milk.
MPs are joyfully depriving our children of genuine thirst-quenching, supremely palatable fizzy drinks through pricing them out of reasonable reach. They are pricey enough already.
Always in government campaigns children are a pushover, being made to suffer all sorts of clueless, adult-slanted ‘reforming’ campaigns, because their age makes protest impracticable.
Time and again I search for protective parents to step in and fight their children’s corner. Where are they? Hiding under the bed, holding hands with the lawyers.
Consider the following corrective statements:
a) Fat children are not pouring out of schools on the way home – this is a press myth. Please report to News of the Weird if you have noticed an excess of fatties leaving schools.
b) Poor diet has nothing to do with fat in humans. Why? The villi glands in the small intestine prevent purposely any fat or complete carbohydrates passing through the intestine walls – for only altered safe nutrients, such as amino acids, are added straight to the blood. Weight is an internal matter: a beanpole can eat as much as an ‘obese’ person yet still be a beanpole.
c) It is not sugar that rots teeth, but plaque – that’s the rotter. Sugar will only stimulate pain at the nerve endings in rot holes.
Some decades ago in the 1960s, similar health persecutions of schoolchildren became established.
During that time press reports were near daily about the condition of girls at death’s door, hospitalised on account of anorexia. After a late stage there is no cure for anorexia – the intestine shrivels up. Pupils were generally run-down or invalids.
White TB test vans were also often parked near schools.
These were big points that helped to introduce schools to a third of a pint of milk daily.
Fainting during assemblies was common and sports, including cross-country runs, were enforced for health reasons. A similar foolish mentality is surfacing now with a one-hour run before primary schools begin. Will we never learn?
Health matters are not for cranks. Keep well away.