Channel 5, On benefits: 100 stone and on the Dole.

I think 'health living' needs to be taught in schools. With the possibility of robots / AI taking over many jobs people will have more leisure time. Healthy eating / exercise/ financial management needs to be taught. Not everyone learns these lessons from their families.

Not being facetious - I went to a burger bar with my son yesterday for lunch, and had the most delicious burger I have had in a long time: it's a vegetarian restaurant and the patty was made out of sweet potato and lentils. Topped with lettuce, tomato, cheese, and optional avocado. Yummy delicious.

I'm amazed that people who can't cook don't learn by watching television (presuming people have a telly)...there are so many inspiring programmes on. A friend's husband who had a very demanding job so he never went near the kitchen, is now out of work and he has taken to cooking the most delicious meals, picks up the free booklet from their local Co-op and follows them to the letter, self-taught.

I think cookery programmes on television put people off cooking. All the recipes are so complicated, they use so many ingredients; many not easily obtained and they put a lot into presentation.

It would not be good television if they did quick simple dishes using 3 ingredients, a stock cube and herbs, cooked in the oven and then served with boiled rice and roast root veg.

The same applies to cookery books and recipes in magazines, too many ingredients, too many instructions. I love food and I am always collecting recipes. The first thing I do is remove or replace many of the secondary ingredients and cut the stages by half, but I can do that. I have the knowledge and skills. Many people do not.

I will not say teaching children about healthy eating at school is pointless, but children learn their eating habits from the food they eat - and most of that is prepared and served within a family context.

From the age she was capable of expressing a food preference DGD's favourite food was salad and she use to raid the fridge for it. As soon as she started school, she began to say she preferred chips, they were an occasional treat at home, and rarely served at school (healthy eating) but that is what other children said they preferred and ate a lot of at home.

Healthy eating and simple recipe books should form part of ante-natal services.

Healthy living was taught in schools as part of the Healthy Schools Programme

Wonder if it's still going?

I disagree Monica there's plenty of simple recipes out there and on TV. In fact some books have been criticised for being too basic like showing how to boil an egg. Was that Mary Berry or Delia?

Where there's a will there's a way. Sadly too many just CBA'd and have been brought up, as you say, on a 'buy a ready meal and pop it in the microwave' culture. In this I agree with you.

I think Healthy Eating is still taught at school, but it is the food children are served that is most likely to shape their tastes and habits - and most of that os not served at school.

I agree that home influences are usually stronger than those taught at schools too.

Usually

I refuse to buy into the poor them, never taught by their mums how to cook healthy food ........... look at all the kids who were literally dragged up looking after them selves grabbing a sandwich here or a packet of crisps there with snotty noses but many grow up to be wonderful sensible Mums and Dads

They, these over, over, over sized people, (not just a bit plump) are LAZY , looked after too much by the state and are fed by feeders Harsh I know but the state and the people looking after them are giving them a death sentence a very early grave and they are putting a burden on the state through their sloth like greed

They should only be given paid for personal care for a limited time and on the belief that they are on a diet and losing weight I would rather the money paid out for special beds, taxis etc was used to pay for a personal trainer for a year to get them into shape to be able to look after themselves whilst they are given healthy benefits they will spend it on food give the vouchers for friuit and veg

I didn't see the programme in question but I ve seen similar in the past

Wasn't there a television programme called "Can't Cook, Won't Cook" some years ago? The title says it all but I think it was about showing people how to provide simple wholesome meals.

Also what about the recipes from people like Jack Monroe? As far as I know they are pretty straightforward.

I was fuming watching this programme. I had some sympathy with man with MS until he started moaning that he couldn't afford to eat healthily on his income.
A healthy diet can be much cheaper than a junk one, and if you can't move around much you won't use so many calories and should therefore reduce their intake.

When I was in general practice in the midlands, I knew many families where no one had worked for 3 or more generations.
I remember being called to one such man who's wife was worried about him
"He's hallucinating doctor, he's talking about getting up and goon to work!"
He had a high temperature from a bad attack of tonsillitis

What about all the healthy fit overweight people, who make no demands on the NHS and earn their living. No, not me, but I know several people who fit that description.

And, as I posted before, many of these truly excessive overweight people, are actually mentally ill in the way anorexics are and need to be sectioned in the way some anorexic people are while their mental and physical problems are. Then of course there are people with diseases like Prader-Willi syndrome and other illnesses.

Of course the fat and lazy do exist, but wholesale condemnation of one group of people because of one characteristic always makes me feel uncomfortable.

I started to watch this but had to switch off at the first ad break after the 30 stone woman had a lunch of "doorstep" sandwiches, sausage rolls and crisps and then started talk about sending out for takeaway pizza and garlic bread costing £25??

Surely if you weigh that much you don't need a lesson in healthy eating to know you have to eat less.

Quite

www.thespruce.com/five-ingredient-recipes-weekend-483310

This site has recipes of only five ingredients. I can cook but often get put off by long lists of ingedients.

Galen that is !

tizliz fab link. I'm about to get up after a nap and make a treat - drop scones.

stansgran, I agree that there are different qualities of beefburger, though it isn't necessary to buy 'organic' in order to get a good one. 'Good' in my book is nutritious and tasty. I don't know what are the nutritious qualities of meat, ligaments, etc sucked off bones, nor of eyeballs, but it they are edible, then they are food even if of poor nutrional content. Whether they taste good is another matter.

Rice is widely accepted as 'decent' food even though it isn't very nutritious, as are various other staple carbohydrate-rich foods.

Just saying.

The point I'm making is that even cheap burgers are not 'junk'. They'll be more nutritious than, say, cream crackers or sugary pop (or even unsugary pop).

It's the quantity that they eat.
My father used to tell patients who said they ate nothing but were stilll obese
"There were no fat people in Belsen" probably non pc today, but it brought the message home to the generation who remembered the war and the horrors of the concentration camps

Just thought(s), two three.

1. Isn't it said that you can eat every part of a pig? I presume that includes eyeballs.

2. Isn't mechanical sucking of stuff off bones just a more efficient method of gnawing what's stuck to them after cooking? Which most of us have done and enjoyed, surely?

3. And sucking marrow out of bones is an excellent idea for nutritiousness.

Perzackly, galen. Quantity is what makes the difference.

My farmer uncle used to eat roast sheep's head, including the eyeballs. My city-bred aunt used to shudder and only cook it on "special occasions" (his) whilst we children would sit at the table peeping through our fingers.

Food offered by various fast food restaurants can be very addictive.
As can sugary sweets and drinks.

I have often stood at the till behind people with shopping baskets full of what I'm sure they would call drinks and sweets.
Its IMHO just chemicals such as artificial sweeteners colourings, gum and several chemical numbers.
Not a food stuff ingredient in sight.
And again possibly quite addictive.

We have had topics the same as this a few years ago on GN and at the time I did comment that my DD was giving cook from scratch lessons at her local school hall she was inviting all the mums once a week to two hour sessions showing them how to manage their budgets and cook and feed a family of 4 healthy meals from scratch with the produce which was available in abundance at that specific time of year,she was even showing them easy ways of managing their housework so they had time with their children and not spend time stuck in front of the TV all day,after 8 weeks she had to cancel the project as the mums couldn't be bothered to attend they would rather sit in McDonalds chatting to each other drinking coffee and stuffing their children full of take away food,costing a small fortune.

I didn't watch the programme but from the comments above, I've an idea what it showed.
The old age pension is not a benefit. Most of us contributed to it over our working lifetime, I did from 17 - 62 with a gap of 2 years followed by 3 years half time in the early 70's when my first child was born. I'm lucky to have an occupational pension which I paid into for 35 years.
As well as many girls and boys not learning to cook in the family home, they didn't have the benefit of being taught to cook from scratch at high school. When mine were told to buy a pizza base, some tomato pure and any other topping they fancies, I could have blown a gasket.
We had Family Centres where young parents were taught how to make nutritious meals for little money, how to budget and where to shop. There were parenting skills classes, midwives and health visitors on site at the family centre. Outreach workers visited families, made relationships with families who may have been 'hard to reach'. I'll stop there because I could weep. I feel I'm writing about some utopia in deprived areas where I worked for years. These good things happened during the early period of the Blair government. The current government has closed over 1000 family centres in the past year. this, despite research confirming they were improving outcomes for many children.

The only things I learnt to cook in domestic science were lemon curd, rock cakes, mashed potato and pancakes.
I only took it in the first (unsegregated) form as after that I was in the science stream ( which did not do domestic science ?)
My dh did all our own cooking, I've had to learn since he died!