The final helping Neil Donnelly
Neil is a Fellow of the BDA and retired Dietetic Services Manager. His main areas of interest are weight management and eating disorders.
I have always been interested in numbers. With numbers you know what you get… or you should! At school, I enjoyed my maths lessons and learning about percentages, fractions and decimals and how they fitted into everyday life. My Dad was a wages manager for a commercial organisation and on occasion, when I was younger, I used to accompany him to the bank, with his ‘commissionaire’, pick up the money for the weekly wages and then go back to his office where he would attend to the wage packets. How times have changed! At secondary school, we also had a maths teacher, a Mr Pike, who, as well as living up to his name, was also on a mission… to make sure that everyone in our class passed O-level Mathematics the year before we needed to try the exam. Everyone did. With the advent of calculators, this ability to work out for yourself what are essentially simple mathematical calculations seems to have disappeared and the understanding of numerical information seems to have been diluted somewhat, not least in when it comes to energy requirements and expenditure. I refer of course to the knowledge, or lack of it, as to how many calories (a number) that the average person needs in order to maintain a healthy weight. This is weight management in its simplest form, whereby it is recommended that men on average consume 2,500Kcal per day and women 2,000Kcal. Variations of course may apply. The more active an individual is, the more energy they expend and the more calories
they can eat to maintain a healthy weight, or maybe lose some excess weight. “Simples,” says chief meerkat Aleksandr Orlov. So, now cometh the message. Because maths skills are so poor, the Chief Executive of the Royal Society for Public Health has concluded that current food labelling may even be ‘fuelling obesity’ and that we need to address the problem by combining symbols and numerical information (activity equivalent calorie labelling) in a bid to educate the public on how they could use up the calories that they would consume should they choose to eat their selected item, by walking/running. For me, this is a challenge that should go back to where I started… at school. What a great way to educate our kids in both maths skills and a healthy active lifestyle. Who will stand up and be the Martin Lewis (Money Saving Expert) of childhood obesity and highlight the benefits of activity equivalent calorie labelling with the added health and wellbeing benefits? Who will introduce an innovative “Simples” approach to get our kids moving? Who is the Mr Pike of today who can make numbers meaningful and fun? We can all be that 1%; that one in a hundred; that 0.01 individual and what a difference that could make! Count me in.
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www.NHDmag.com May 2016 - Issue 114
