THE MINISTER FOR Health has confessed to a weakness for chicken wings, as an open meeting on food addiction took place in Dublin today.
Speaking to reporters before he opened the conference this morning, Varadkar said his busy lifestyle as a minister often means he is forced to make some less than healthy food choices.
“I try to avoid it, but I do from time to time, of course,” he said. “Like everyone else, I suppose, work is busy and I don’t always have time to cook or whatever but I certainly wouldn’t be of the view that fast food should be outlawed or anything like that.
It’s just that maybe all of us eat it too often or too frequently and we need to be particularly careful around children as well.”
He told us he’s partial to a good chicken wing when he does decide to pig out on something less healthy.
Take responsibility
Varadkar said he believes that it should be primarily people, rather than companies producing food, who take responsibility for what they put in their mouths. However he also said government needs to put policies in place, particularly to protect children and give information to people about the food they buy and eat.
There’s a couple of basic messages around health – just don’t smoke at all, don’t drink too much, eat well and get lots of physical activity – and I think if we all followed that basic advice, not only would we be better off as individuals, it would save our health services a lot of money now and into the future.
Studies have shown that two out of three Irish adults and one in four primary school children are overweight or obese. The problem becomes worse with age too, with only 13% of Irish men over 50 are a healthy weight.
Food addiction
Today’s meeting, organised by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, also heard from a number of health specialist who discussed the concept of food and eating addictions.
Chief Specialist at the FSAI, Dr Mary Flynn, told delegates that people might things they are addiction when they find it impossible to avoid treat foods. However, high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt foods are actually designed by highly advances scientific intelligence to appeal to our human sense in a way that completely surpasses the appeal of the less processed food that we actually need to nourishment.
“As well as being far more tempting, these foods are cheaper, more convenient and promoted much more aggressively than the foods we actually need for health,” she said. “It’s an uneven competition and we are only human.”
The idea of a person having a ‘food addiction’ is still a controversial question, according to Dr John Menzies, of the Centre for Integrative Physiology at the University of Edinburgh.
“Appetite is mainly controlled by well-characterised unconscious brain systems that ensure we seek out and consume enough energy and nutrients for survival. However, it’s clear that many of us are eating much more than we need to survive.
While there is strong evidence that sweet and fatty foods activate the reward pathway in our brains, it has yet to be firmly established whether this can be termed an addiction.
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