Get the full story at thegrocer.co.uk 17 August 2019 | The Grocer | 21higgins
Lois VallelyC
an diet improve your
mental health? That
was the discussion on
The Doctor’s Kitchen podcast
(12 August), in which Dr Rupy
Aujla spoke to Professor Felice
Jacka from Deakin University
in Australia about why we need
to consider food as the basis for
our mental health throughout
our lives.
The way our diets have
changed is terrible and is
having huge impacts on
people’s health, said Jacka.
At the same time, mental
disorders are one of the most
common forms of disability.
The fact that the two are linked
is important.
There are all sorts of
reasons we choose the wrong
foods. Jacka said the food
environment needed to
change to support healthy
choices, making healthy food
the cheapest, most heavily
marketed and most available.
And when it comes to
encouraging people to eat more
healthily, it’s not always helpful
to make the conversation about
obesity, because if people- especially those who are
already overweight – think the
only reason they need to eat
better is to lose weight, they are
likely to give up and just eat the
junk food they’ve been trying
to resist. “If you start feeding
your brain with good food,
you’ll start to feel better,” Jacka
argued.
Apart from a minor issue
with the sound for the rst
25 minutes (which Aujla
promised would be xed for
future episodes) , this was an
informative and wide-ranging
podcast. Although perhaps an
hour and eight minutes is a bit
of a long time for an interview
with just one person – it lacked
structure a little.
CRITICAL EYE
Making meat sustainable
second opinion
Professor Chris Elliott is director
of the Institute for Global Food
Security at Queen’s University,
BelfastI
t was hard not to hear
about the special report
on climate and land by
the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change last week.
This work was the effort of
more than 100 scientists , and is
hugely important and timely. It
was also widely reported on in
many parts of the UK media.
Except, of course, it wasn’t. Only
a portion of the report made the
headlines – and that was focused
on meat being the main cause of
climate change. It is not, though
it does play an important role.
We o en get bombarded with
stat s on meat and the environ-
ment. Livestock farming can be
responsible for anything from
10% to 35% of carbon emissions,
depending on what you read.
This is because di erent groups
calculat e in di erent ways.
I read as many of the articles as
possible and watched quite a bit
of TV coverage. I observed hostile
commentary about current farm-
ing practices and sensible coun-
ter-arguments from the NFU.
It would be wrong to suggest
the IPCC report was incorrect,
but the case for the UK retaining
its proud tradition for livestock
farming needs to be made.The need for environmentally
sustainable agriculture in the UK
isn’t new. However, neither the
C A P nor our national aversion
to anything agritech in farming
have helped matters.
If we, as a nation, produce less
meat, milk and eggs, we won’t
stop wanting to eat them – so
what then? We decrease our foodsecurity, import from regions that
are far from close to carbon neu-
tral and have much lower stand-
ards in terms of food safety and
animal welfare. In e ect, we o -
shore our carbon problem.
But the status quo isn’t accept-
able either. It’s essential that we
improve soil management and
plant hedgerows and trees, all of
which are low-tech solutions that
can do enormous good.
Then there’s the role of agr-
itech, from the manipulation of
the cattle microbiome to reduce
methane to the use of GM or gene-
edited crops to capture more car-
bon, and more. But what will UK
consumers see as the right course
of action? After all, they ulti-
mately drive what farmers pro-
duce. Equally importantly, what
direction will the government’s
agriculture policy take?“It’s essential that
we improve soilmanagement and
plant hedgerows”Chris Elliott