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    今天，英国政府观察机构的一位主要官员警告说，英国人所吃的食物是欧洲最糟糕的食物。

    在与《独立报》的记者见面中，Dame Deirdre Hutton——她是食物标准司（FSA）的主席——认为英国是欧洲国家在营养方面最糟糕的国家，警告说社会的各个阶层饮食结构均严重失衡。

    她说，我们与食物的“糟糕关系”引起总体人口的明显肥胖，而年轻的女孩正考虑节食减肥。她将此称之为“疯狂的事情”。

    昨天，政府发表新闻说，英国是欧洲肥胖人最多的国家，有2/3的男性和60%的女性超重或肥胖。首相称，肥胖已经是危害公众健康的首要问题，承诺说，明年将对此出台新的政策。

    在办公室里与Dame Deirdre见面时，她正受困于与一家有太多不合格食品的食品公司的纠纷中，她说“我认为目前有证据表明英国人营养状态真的很糟糕。”尽管这种情况在较低的社会-经济阶层中尤为明显，但实际上，在较高的社会-经济阶层中我们也不能自欺欺人的说，只有较低的社会-经济阶层才发生这样的事情。

    她接着说，“这是一个广泛的社会问题，如果感兴趣，你可以看看自己六、七岁的孩子，你会发现他们的食谱非常糟糕。”

    跨国食品公司巨头们和英国最大的超市Tesco，正在抵制FSA发出的警告——FSA罗列了一张表——关于人们日常喜爱的食物中所含食盐、脂肪和糖的比例。独立调查显示FSA的系统是最容易理解的。

    Dame Deirdre解释说，“我们目前的营养状态所引起的最明显的症状是肥胖，这不是一件简单的事情，在一些区域还有许多隐藏在营养问题下面的同样重要的问题，但最明显的问题是由饮食中高盐食物所引起的肥胖，而且，肥胖发生几率的增加是以指数形式增加的，正如发生在美国的情况”。

    “尽管欧洲其他国家正在赶超我们或是至少以同样的方式缓慢增长，但是，我们仍是营养状况最糟糕和肥胖者最多的国家。”

    她说，全国的营养结构不合理的情况已经累及儿童，你必须承认，女孩子正在担心超重的问题——才七岁大的孩子们说他们正在考虑节食减肥。“这真是一件疯狂的事情。”

    竞选者估计说，每年大约有60,000英国人死于不合理的饮食结构，和死于癌症的80,000人差不多，是死于公路交通事故的人数的15倍。

    昨天，公共卫生大臣Caroline Flint发起了英国公共卫生政府计划，他说，“在过去十年中，儿童与成人肥胖患者的快速增加会在未来引起非常严重的健康问题。”尽管在过去的调查中显示英国人的膳食情况正在改善，2001年的官方研究发现大多数人只吃官方所推荐的适合每天食用的5种含有新鲜水果和蔬菜的食物中的2.8种。

    在2005年FSA调查的家庭中，只有一半的家庭每天使用新鲜的或未加工的食物。大约有6百万人从不使用新鲜的食物进行烹调。

    Joanna Blythman是《糟糕的英国饮食》的作者，对Dame Deirdre关于FSA以前对此“过于谨小慎微”的观点表示赞同和欢迎。

    Mrs Blythman说，“在这个世界上，唯一比英国饮食结构更加糟糕的地方是美国，在欧洲，我们作为一个根本不懂得欣赏食物和以垃圾食物为生的国家而格外显眼。”

    “我们吃掉的垃圾食物是其他欧洲人吃掉的垃圾食物的总和——占所有准备好的食物的一半，我们现在看起来是最肥胖的欧洲人。”

'Crazy' relationship with food is killing us, says FSA
By Martin Hickman, Consumer Affairs Correspondent
Published: 11 October 2006

British people eat the worst food in Europe, the head of a Government watchdog warns today.

In an interview with The Independent, Dame Deirdre Hutton, chairman of the Food Standards Agency, placed the UK at the bottom of European countries on nutrition and warned that all parts of society were eating badly.

She said a "troubled" relationship with food caused mass obesity in the general population and made young girls consider going on diets. "It's crazy," she said.

Yesterday the Government revealed Britain to be the fattest nation in Europe, with two-thirds of men and 60 per cent of women overweight or obese. Ministers said obesity would be the priority in public health and promised to launch a new strategy next year.

In an interview marking her first year in office, Dame Deirdre - who is locked in a battle with the food industry over processed food labelling - said: "I think the evidence to me suggests that the UK has really quite poor nutritional status.

"And although it is particularly prevalent in the lower socio-economic groups, actually the higher socio-economic groups cannot kid themselves it is the only place where it happens.

"So it is a broad society problem and the interesting thing is you can look at children as young as six or seven and see that they have a very strange relationship with food."

The multinational food giants and Britain's biggest supermarket, Tesco, are boycotting the FSA's "traffic light" labelling scheme in favour of daily percentages for salt, fat and sugar, even though independent surveys suggest the agency's system is the easiest to understand.

"The most obvious symptom of our nutritional status is obesity," explained Dame Deirdre.

"It's not the only thing - there are equal problems of under nourishment in some areas - but the most obvious problem is obesity coupled with things like high salt in the diet. And the rate of increase appears to be exponential - rather like it is in the US.

"Although other countries in Europe are catching us up or at least showing a trend growing the same way, we nonetheless remain right at the bottom in terms of poor nutrition and obesity."

She said the country's difficult relationship with food extended to children. "You have got really young girls worried about being overweight - children as young as seven saying they want to put themselves on a diet. It's crazy."

Campaigners estimate that bad diet kills as many as 60,000 Britons each year - not far off the 80,000 deaths from cancer and 15 times the number killed on the roads.

Launching the Government's Health Profile of England yesterday, Caroline Flint, the Public Health Minister, said: "The rapid increase in child and adult obesity over the past decade is storing up very serious health problems for the future." Although surveys in the past year suggest that Britons are improving their diet, the last official research in 2001 found that most people eat 2.8 of the recommended five daily portions of fresh fruit and vegetables a day.

Only half the household surveyed by the FSA in 2005 were cooking with fresh or raw ingredients every day. About six million people never or almost never cook fresh food.

Joanna Blythman, author of Bad Food Britain, welcomed Dame Deirdre's comments because the agency had previously been "pussyfooting around".

"The only place in the world with worse food than Britain is the US," said Mrs Blythman. "In Europe, we stand out as a strange country where we have never understood food and exist on a diet of junk.

"We eat as much junk food as the rest of Europe put together - half of all of Europe's ready meals. And we are now looking like the fatties of Europe."

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article1834351.ece

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