Cancer Council feeling a tad unnoticed?
August 18th, 2009 at 01:19pm
I don’t think there’s a better to get yourself some publicity than calling for a banning!
The World Cancer Research Fund warned parents to stop serving the processed meat, saying they could lead to bowel cancer.
Instead of a total ban on the ham sandwich, limiting the amount of processed meat a child ate was a better option, Cancer Council nutrition manager Kathy Chapman said.
“If a child is eating ham sandwiches every day they are potentially missing out on fresh vegetables and important nutrients,” she said.
Healthier fillings include tuna, salmon, egg and salad sandwiches.
Dietician Susie Burrell of Westmead Children’s Hospital in Sydney said a ham sandwich once a week was OK.
Jan Moir’s headline in the UK’s Daily Mail was good for a chuckle:
Eating a ham sarnie causes cancer? These ham-fisted food fascists are just pig ignorant
The article, which I think may actually be an opinion piece, is even better.
Surely an occasional ham baguette with spread-u-lite butter and free-range mustard can hardly be a risk?
Oh, you bet it can, says the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF). If children eat bacon, ham, salami and other types of processed meat during their formative years, it will raise the risk of them contracting cancer – bowel cancer in particular – over a lifetime.
It will also encourage a bad ham habit. The brats might get to like the evil pig meat stuff. So it is better, the charity says, that children learn to view processed meat as an occasional treat, if it is eaten at all.
In the latest in a long line of food scares, this one scares me more than most.
First, in the typical manner of these over-arching health warnings, it is so unfair, particularly on those who already have this type of cancer for no other reason than they lost out in the genetic lottery. Now they will be dismissed by some as merely selfish hot-dog guzzlers who had it coming.
Also, this is not merely a health caution, it is – if you read between the lines – sly, anti-meat propaganda. They are messing, once more, with our carnivore minds.
The WCRF claim that a recent survey has shown that two thirds of the people in Britain did not know that eating processed meat increased the risk of cancer. This, apparently, despite the scientific evidence about a link being ‘convincing’.
I like that ‘convincing’, don’t you? What I would say about that ‘convincing’ is that it is unconvincing.
And surely there is enough pressure on adults to be good parents without accusing them of poisoning their children by slipping the occasional ham-on-rye into their satchel?
I can see, perhaps, that if you bought the vilest, past-its-sell-by-date, Barbie-pink ham you could find, crammed a pound of it between two slices of sugar-rich white loaf then forced it down the gullet of little Timmy or baby Lola every school day from the moment they started nursery until the tykes graduated, then, point taken WCRF. It might not be too healthy.
Yet it is the charity’s tacit suggestion, odious and unsettling, that we are raising a generation of tongue-lolling, drooling slope-heads who will be unable to differentiate between smoked ham and smoked heroin when the moment comes.
One slice of breaded Wiltshire and the fools will be lost to civilisation. The bad karma of Parma will live with them for ever.
What the health police seem to want us to do is nurture an army of mini-Howard Hughes types in knee-socks; freakish, food dictator children who will scream at chocolate, refuse to eat anything but the purest substances and insist that their lunch is wrapped in banana leaves to avoid carcinogenic plastics or the threat of bisphenol-A from their thermos flasks.
Does that sound far-fetched or even hysterical? Well, thanks to the constant meddling of the health police and their blizzard of mixed-message warnings over the years, it has already happened.
Doctors are reporting increasing incidences of something called orthorexia nervosa; the latest fashionable boa constrictor of an eating disorder to grip the middle classes.
Described as a fixation on righteous eating, it affects mostly well-educated, middle-class men and women over the age of 30. Well, it would do, wouldn’t it? You won’t find starving tribesmen in Darfur obsessing about the organic origins of their sugar-free orange juice.
[..]
Devoted orthorexics avoid anything containing sugar, salt, caffeine, alcohol, wheat, yeast, soya, gluten, dairy and corn. Extreme cases will also avoid any foodstuffs that have come into contact with pesticides, herbicides or that contain artificial additives.It is a little like anorexia nervosa, except with extra carbs, and followers must think they are going to live for ever. If you waved a bacon sarnie under their noses, they would faint with horror.
[..]
Searching every day for fresh supplies of things like soy milk, wheatgrass juice, wild Tibetan goji berries, pure premium coconut water, hempseed and organic grain quinoa? It must be exhausting.
Brilliant read. I strongly recommend reading the rest of it.
Samuel
Entry Filed under: Bizarreness,General News
