Sunday 13 March 2016

NHS Honey-Trap Tax

Honey traps are associated with cold war shenanigans where superpowers used attractive women (and men) to bait big-wigs of enemy countries. These honies then used the seductive arts to liberate important strategic information.

Simon Stevens, head of NHS England intends his honey trap to be a tax set at about 20% on the price of "unhealthy food" sold in NHS hospitals. In other words, part of the UK National Health Service wishes to continue to sell items it defines as UNHEALTHY, in order to make even more money from them than it does now.

A tax imposed on the kind of foods most people like to eat in one form or another, precisely because they're so attractive to the human palate due to their efficient delivery of energy to our bodies. I say this as more of a savoury than a sweet person.

Our bodies need energy to continue to exist, calorie dense foods obviously fulfil this better than calorie poor foods. To the extent that this can make these foods an attractive option at times, even to those not particularly fond of sweetness, so effectively do they fulfil the purpose of food.

They are not faddictive, they're useful.

Certain people simply cannot accept this though.

They want to fight the body by pretending the opposite is true. That calorie poor foods are better and calorie dense worse. This is purely intended to aid weight loss dieting by another name.

I'm not saying anyone shouldn't try living on watery veg, with a smidgen of watery fruit for a treat- if that's what they wish. Each to their own. Just that it would make more sense for them to admit they're fighting their body's underlying organization, and accept that it will protest loudly, rather than framing such resistence as evidence of innate human greed.

You can't fault the usual shamelessness. Whilst positing the motive for this as to improve public health. Instead of no longer selling this evil muck, they wish to continue selling it to make even more money, despite claiming it is draining NHS coffers by causing ill health.

Holy elementary ethics and finance fail.

Some may wonder [no names], why health claims to be flogging unhealth and moaning about the purported costs of said unhealth.  None of this old pony changes the essential design of the body, setting up a fractuous fight with our very direction of biology.

Instead of just recognizing that food or more precisely hunger is not an apt target for managing/altering weight or health (in the main). This ill conceived furrow continues to be ploughed come hell or high water, despite increasing casualities of its own making.

People like Stevens feel they have the right to requisition the free time of NHS employees and/or the public,
....schemes to increase the number of staff walking and cycling to work, and provide more opportunities for other physical activity, including team sports, fitness classes and running clubs. 
Oh really? Who appointed him director of people's free time or how they should get to work? This is undoubtedly part of the attraction of this time wasting failure. It allows "important people" to encroach into areas they have no business being in and would otherwise be shy of.

People's use of their own time is not the call of their employers. It used to be (still is in proper science) a signal of a bad remedy that it takes up too much time, especially in relation to the benefit it is supposed to generate. 

Usually, this extent of time sucking plus heavy (mental) bandwidth draining would be paired with something approaching a deadly chronic condition, when there's no better alternative. Not a hypothetical possibility of elevated risk.

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