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WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION research published today contends that Europe is getting fatter every year, and heading for an obesity crisis.
Nearly all Irish adults are likely to be overweight in 15 years’ time, according to the study.
Gema Fruhbeck, a nutrition expert and president of the executive committee of the European Association for the Study of Obesity, talks about solutions:
Q: Why is the obesity problem so difficult to tackle?
A: Obesity is not like an infection (which can be treated), obesity is something that is going to be with us all of our life.
Technology has made life easy for people, while driving them to be very inactive. Even leisure time is very much related to computer screens and it is necessary to change the mentality of society.
The current economic crisis also has a negative impact, leading low-income people or the unemployed to eat higher-energy food which is cheaper, rather than follow a healthy diet which is more expensive.
It is necessary to collaborate with politicians, urban planners, architects and sociologists to really change the whole framework in which the society addresses the problem of obesity.
Q: What are some nations getting right, such as the Netherlands where levels are on a downward trend?
A: It’s easy to cycle in Holland, which is not the case in many other European countries.
From a political point of view, they are a nation that has been very pre-occupied about initiatives to tackle the obesity problem.
We really need to be pro-active, so unless policy makers make the decision to have an action against obesity, it’s going to be very difficult. And what we are seeing now is almost the opposite since it’s becoming so frequent and so normal, many people tend to downplay the importance of obesity, many people say it’s not a disease.
Q: What would you propose to tackle obesity?
A: We really need to put a lot of effort in educating our children about healthy lifestyle.
Most of our celebrations are related to food, social events where food is important. Try to be able to combine this in the whole of your life, so I’ll have a very nice (meal) with friends, have a great time, but this can also be done by going for a walk and not sitting all day. We need a mentality change.
Taxes on junk food do not work because they penalise people with lower income.
Packaging is very important and so is labelling and telling the people how to read the labels.
Fighting obesity is impossible without realising that obesity is the gateway to ill health.
- © AFP 2015.
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Same jihad, different country. The US has since 1983 resettled many Somali refugees in Minnesota. And they’ve had some screening issues with both the first and second generation.
“Al Qaeda’s Somali affiliate has claimed credit for a Saturday suicide bombing that killed 10 in Mogadishu, and says one of the men who carried out the attack was a 22-year-old man from Minnesota known to his friends back home as “Bullethead.”
Abdisalan Hussein Ali, who was born in Somalia but raised in Minneapolis, disappeared from Minnesota in 2008.
…he would be the fourth Somali-American to launch a suicide attack in Somalia.
“That is a fundamental change in how we have seen terrorism [since] the attacks of 9/11,” said Napolitano. Since 2006 as many as 30 young Somali men have left the United States to fight in Somalia. The probe into the youths going to fight overseas in Somalia’s war received increased attention from the FBI and DHS officials after Shirwa Ahmed, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Somalia, blew himself up in a suicide bombing in northern Somalia Oct. 28, 2008 in an attack that targeted an African Union intelligence post. A second young man from the Seattle area blew himself up in an attack in 2009.”
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/al-shabab-suicide-bomber-somalia-american/story?id=14851524
@Marlowemallow: And some are now joining IS instead. The mainstream media, of course, is ‘puzzled’ about why Somali heritage young people would go to fight in Syria. Because it’s apparently difficult to understand that not everyone views the world as divided into nation-states.
“Refugees began settling in Minnesota after the government of Somalia collapsed in 1991. This isn’t the first time the community has struggled to counter the appeal of violent extremism to the state’s Somalis, but is much more puzzling. Somalis have no national or ethnic ties to Syria and Iraq, a link that helped explain why some went to fight with al-Shabab when Ethiopia invaded Somalia in 2006.
Young men joining that terrorist group felt a nationalistic call to defend their nation against rival state Ethiopia, but many of those drawn to the Islamic State were born in the U.S. and have never been to Somalia, let alone Syria. Still in April, six Twin Cities youth were arrested for attempting to join the Islamic State group. At least one of the men has conspired to travel to Syria since 2014, according to prosecutors.
“As far as we know there is no one profile that brings [together] all these people who are leaving,” says Abdisalam Adam, an imam at Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque in Minneapolis. “Some people say, ‘Oh they are the ones who are not doing well,’ or whatever. That’s not true. There are some of them who have the opportunity of working, some are in school.”
Are any bombings not horrific?
@The Guru: all bombing are horrific.
@The Guru: It’s a quote from the police official who is the source for the story. Captain Mohamed Hussein is unlikely to be implying that Islamist bombings are more horrific than any other kind.
Has not Al-Shabab aligned itself with ISIS?
@Warthog: Think that was part of Boko Haram – they became Islamic State in West Africa.
Lovely group of moderate islamists. Respectors of human rights par excellence. A beacon of humanity to the world.
Little Mogadishu,Minnesota, home to high concentration of Somali support for Al-Shabab and ISIS is now represented by Jew-hater Muslim convert Keith Ellison in the house and is running for DNC leadership.
Ellison has tried to thwart the FBI from blocking the money supply from Minnesota to Al-Shabab.
—”The Little Mogadishu neighborhood is represented by Democrat congressman Keith Ellison, who liberals proudly tout as the first Muslim-American Congressman. Ellison – who famously swore his oath of office on a Koran – has been a key player in public attacks on those seeking to expose the threat of radical Islam, including former Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert.
Somali terror cell Al-Shabaab has been actively and successfully recruiting in Ellison’s district for years, even producing a slick recruitment video inviting young men in Minnesota to travel overseas and join the jihad. The video has proven disturbingly effective.—-”
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/05/05/the-texas-terror-connection-to-muslim-congressman-keith-ellisons-minneapolis-district/
What a hole
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