Tested and proved. A good after school snack ,strips of celery and carrot crisped up in iced water and HOME MADE pop corn just as it comes out of your own machine, no sugar added. It has a pleasant nutty flavour and is pure vegetable. Very satisfying, filling and non fattening.

Perhaps a tax on processed food is the way to go. I find any Kellogs product is fluffed, salted and sugared into what I would call junk food although it is marketed as a health food supplying some major percentage of the daily requirement of some obscure or readily available ingredient such as iron. Kraft, Nestle, Arnotts,and many others also practice this charade. Look at the supermarket shelf space tied up with Kellog products. In poorer countries supermarket shelves are filled with whole grains, pulses and un-processed food. The processed food is restricted to a small high priced corner. I find it obscene that Coco-cola is cheaper than water. The people who package and sell bottled water must be making a killing. I suggest any product that has added salt or sugar attract a large tax impost.

sajo: Excuses, excuses. I'm a vegan. I'm very much a part of a fringe group, but I deal with it. I don't expect to bring in the nanny state. There's a really simple way around this -- make people bear the consequences of their actions by paying the real costs of their healthcare, instead of expecting other people to pick up the tab. I'm really opposed to this idea of "sin taxes" though. Why should someone who can handle an occasional bit of junk food be lumped in with the habitually irresponsible and slugged extra for such food?

Retirement villages and nursing homes are filled with elderly people who have long passed their three score and ten.
All would have lived through the'Great Depression'and WW2 when food was either scarse or rationed.
They lived through times when cheaper cuts of meat were the only things affordable and most homes had a vegetable garden, a few chooks and fruit trees. They ate what ever was available and they ate a healthy diet because there was no such thing as convenience food or take away unless it was fish and chips occasionally.
Todays more affluent have a wide choice but laziness is served up far too often and the results certainly show.
I doubt that today's generation will have the long lives of their grandparents, they just do not get the proper base to build on.

shorbe, I think you may be onto something here.

>>There's a really simple way around this -- make people bear the consequences of their actions by paying the real costs of their healthcare, instead of expecting other people to pick up the tab.<<

And the way to do this is, of course, not by simply telling everyone "OK folks, from now on it's User Pays Healthcare". That would be political suicide.

It will be through a system of compulsory medical insurance.

But not the wimpy kind we have today, which is effectively a government-mandated rate card with little bearing on reality.

What shorbe has foreshadowed is a truly competitive Health Insurance system, whereby everyone pays the premium that reflects exactly their propensity to incur costs.

So twenty-something vegans will be charged the actuarially-derived amount (plus brokerage and administration fees of course) that covers them for their likely medical costs. A septuagenarian carnivore who smokes and drinks, however, would pay a teensy bit more.

But it would be totally fair, because the septuagenarian smoking carnivore would be "paying the real costs of their healthcare".

The next stage of "paying the real costs of our healthcare" would be when the insurance companies are allowed to sift through our DNA for possible genetic traits that might ultimately become a burden on fellow premium payers. It wouldn't be fair, would it, if the information that we would be genetically more likely to suffer a heart attack in our fifties did not affect our premium?

Sorry, shorbe. Your concept of "bearing the consequences" is unfortunately not confined to a few fatties.

Oh please, what a lot of self satisfied skinny people we are. Fat people, it's all your fault, just get up off your wobbly backsides, do some exercise and stop burdening the health system. Easy!

Well if its that easy, why are there any fat people at all? There is nothing acceptable about being fat. Not even the dimmest fatty could possibly think being fat is a good thing. All the beautiful people on television with glamourous lives, lots of them are fat aren't they? Film stars? Rock stars? Models? Athletes? Hmmm.

Likewise with the message about personal responsibility. Could it be any clearer? Does anyone actually know a fat person who says "no, its not my fault it is McDonalds". All those diet books, weight loss courses etc etc - what is the message: You can do it, exercise, take responsibility etc".

Which is all fine, but clearly this doesn't work for everyone. As the author of the original article says, despite messages about individual responsibility which are so prevalent, there are many aspects of modern society which encourage fatness. Addressing these will make it easier for people to deal with their weight problems. And just in case anyone thinks this is a rant by a disgruntled porker, I am as skinny as can be, and remain so despite eating whatever the hell I want.