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Dear Susan,
British doctors totally discount the dangers of serum cholesterol. The snake oil salesmen have scared you. Threaten them with price controls. Price controls are a very, very bad idea but they deserve the payback.
Regards,
Roy
Just think. Less salt and worse schools. How do these jokers keep getting elected?
Dear Susan,
It's the people next door. Your friends and neighbors. If my experience is typical then you probably have an uncle or two who are one of them. We have a grand experiment going on. We decide. It's tedious. There are fits and starts. Or maybe that's stits and farts. Whatever, it is the best that has ever been. In the words of Mr. Dylan: "He who is first shall later be last". And back at ya fella.
I know from my parents of the depression and WWII. Today is a walk in the park. Vent! It's good for the soul and fun too. I just don't take it near as serious as I did 40 years ago.
Regards,
Roy
Hi Susan
I blundered in here from google - was looking for something else to do with Gateshead but I thought I'd try to correct a few misunderstandings while I'm here.
I live and work in Gateshead, which is in north east England. The council here is actually one of the very best in the country. There are no crumbling schools, in fact they've just replaced all the schools for 11-18 year old kids with new buildings.
The roads are as good as you'll find anywhere in the world and the council are superb at keeping the streets clean. The politicians keep getting elected, in answer to Katies question above, because the public satisfaction rate with the council is in the top 5% in Britain.
What the article above fails to mention is that our fish and chip shops will put salt on your fries for you if you are having them packaged to eat later. (to clear up any confusion - what you call french fries we call chips, what you call chips we call crisps). In more balanced articles in our regional papers, they mention that the council tests found people were getting over half their recommended daily intake of salt from the 17 hole ones, which are actually flour shakers meant for bakers.
The council say they produced the shakers to counter this problem, as customers are obviously free to put on as much as they want if they salt the fries themselves.
Although the council does a really good job here, the local population suffers the effects of industrial decline and life expectancy is less than the national average, and heart disease rates are sky high.
I am not worried that they have spent £2,000 of my money on this, it would only repair a few yards of broken sidewalk anyway. It should lead to health improvements that will save hundreds of thousands of pounds in treatment costs in years to come, and that must be a good thing.
It's a real pity the newspaper you've quoted wrote such an inaccurate article, the project was launched over a year ago and got nothing but praise in the regional papers that reported it accurately at the time.
Frank a nanny state is a nanny state no matter how some try to justify it. You would tell me that there is nothing that the money spent could have gone towards that would have been more useful? That I do not believe. If people did not like the amount of salt, they would not go to the places and eat there...it is a persons CHOICE.... it shouldn't be the state making any choice like that for them.
That is the bottom line.
Hi Susan
The shops don't have to use the use the shakers, this is hardly the state making the choice - I think over 95% of the shops use them voluntarily becaus they think they are a good idea.
£2,000 does not go far, and as the article says, the state has to pay £7billion every year treating the diseases associated with poor diet and smoking, so it makes real financial sense.
Are you against it on grounds of principal or cost?
That's true Frank, but there might have been a cheaper way to do it. On a voluntary level. And in the US they make salt shakers that have only 5 holes (I have one of those). They only cost $.50 here.
Hi Katie
I wish things were that cheap over here. In our local trade supplier the big ones they handed out are about £3 wholesale. According to our regional paper, Gateshead bought them in bulk for around £2 each.
You must remember this is a one off cost, the shops will have to buy their own in future. Putting a one page ad in a city newspaper here costs around £2,500 so, like I say, I think what they've done makes real financial sense.
As I said in my first post, Gateshead are a really good council, and they tend to do everything pretty well.
They tend to do everything well?
What like running the town centre down to a ghost town - 8 months everything has been shut for while they fail to decide what to do with the car park costing the tax payer 10s of thousands in business rates. As for all the schools they are all built using PFI money, which is another great idea which we will be haunting the tax payer for years.
Keep on doleing out money to the locals and they would vote in a monkey with a red rosette.
This is just another case of the health and saftey gestapo who run this country micro managing as they have no idea how to fix real problems.
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