Roads, rates, rubbish and diets
August 19th, 2009 at 11:54am
The federal government have found something else to regulate…diets!
The Rudd Government’s Preventative Health Taskforce is understood to have called for the weight-loss industry to be regulated in a report handed down last month.
[..]
It wants a wide-ranging review of diet products and a common code of practice drawn up covering the cost, the training of counsellors and the promotion of the diets.The Dietitians Association of Australia is backing the recommendation.
A spokesman told The Daily Telegraph all commercial diet programs should be assessed by a body of experts similar to the Therapeutic Goods Administration, which assesses drugs for safety and efficacy before they can go on sale.
The association said regulation should require businesses marketing a diet program to provide evidence to a panel of experts showing what percentage of those who used the diet kept the weight off two years after starting.
So, in other words, let’s kill the diet industry by requiring all diet programs to have a two year unprofitable trial before it can be examined by a panel of experts for some unknown period of time, after which it might, and I stress the word “might”, be able to go on sale.
The article continues with what appears to be the moronic reasoning behind the taskforce’s idea.
A Choice survey of pharmacy diet programs published earlier this year found they were successful at helping people shed kilos in a hurry if followed closely – but they did little to change a person’s lifestyle in the long term.
Errr, sorry, but that’s not what diet programs are there to do. Diet programs are there to help people lose weight, usually they will encourage a healthy lifestyle afterwards, but the staff of these diet programs can’t force people to live a healthy life after the program ends…that is a personal choice. Diet programs should not be punished by the government because people choose to return to their old ways.
You’d think that the government doesn’t have enough to do or something, so they go in search of new things to annoy us with. Seriously, roads, rates, rubbish, some schools, some emergency services, and leave us alone to make our own choices.
Samuel
Entry Filed under: Bizarreness,General News,Samuel's Editorials
