Misleading Newspaper Headings Cause Health Confusion
‘You can eat an extra cheeseburger a day’ – say diet experts!
This was the headline used in the Daily Mail on Sunday to report research carried out by a committee of Britain’s leading nutritional experts on the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) that found we could eat an extra 400 calories a day.
Besides the fact that the headline is totally misleading, to compare the extra calorie intake to a cheeseburger is totally irresponsible, as if we don’t have enough to think about when it comes to our health do we then get told that we can eat extra calories in the form of junk food!
I am pretty sure that the scientific results did not say, ‘you can consume a cheeseburger everyday with no worries of what it might do to your body’, instead the research revealed that with consideration of the amount of exercise done by an individual a day then it may be possible to consume an extra 400 calories. These calories do not allow people to be irresponsible with the food they consume nor should they be taken light heartedly. Food consumption should be based on listening to your body’s hunger signals and reflect your daily activity, they are not saying you can allow yourself a cheeseburger, they are saying that extra calories can be consumed through sensible eating.
In my opinion a healthy consumption of food is not reliant on calories – calories act as a guide but can be construed that as long as we do not consume more than our daily limit then it doesn’t matter what we eat – which is not correct, if we ate burgers three times a day but stayed within our calorific limit then that could be interpreted as ‘healthy’ – and this is why there is so much confusion. It seems the papers enjoy making it harder for society!
Tags: calories, Daily Mail, health advice
