Battersea Park Adventure Playground facing closure

Battersea Park Playground occupied

Battersea Park Playground no to cuts

Today, just 1 in 5 children regularly play outside in their neighbourhood. The rest are denied the chance to get out of the house and have the everyday adventures that – to people of my generation – are what childhood is all about. — David Cameron

Battersea Park Adventure Playground what a wonderful place for kids to play, a safe place for kids to play, you can see the joy on their faces.

It beggars belief that mean-spirited Wandsworth Council wishes to shut it down. I dare say if there was a playground run for profit by McDonald’s, Wandsworth would support it, the planners would push it through.

We are facing an epidemic of childhood obesity. Anything that encourages children to be active should be welcome. Were these kids not in the adventure playground, they would either be cooped up in high-rise flats or on the street with street gangs, robbing and doing drugs.

They are being fed decent food at the adventure playground. A pleasant change from McDonald’s, where too many parents abuse their kids.

Shame on Wandsworth for trying to shut down Battersea Park Adventure Playground.

Monday of this week Wandsworth were due to send in the bulldozers. The Adventure Playground has now been occupied by local parents and kids to prevent its destruction. Wandsworth Council is threatening the occupiers with legal action for occupying their own park.

It makes a mockery of Localism where local people are supposed to decide what happens in their locality.

Argyll and Bute Council picked a fight with Martha Payne for daring to write a food blog NeverSeconds about their disgusting school dinners, Wandsworh Council picks a fight with local kids by shutting down their adventure playground.

The occupation has the backing of tennis star Greg Rusedski, celebrity chef Levi Roots and Lord Dubs of Battersea, the former Labour MP, comedian Mark Thomas, Bianca Jagger, founder and chair of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, and presenter Gia Milinovich. London Play has also given their support, as has Play England.

For more information, with further videos about Battersea Adventure Playground, check out Wandsworth Against Cuts.

The occupation has also set up a facebook page.

Wandsworth are cutting basic services, closing libraries, cutting school crossing patrols, refuse to pay their lowest paid workers a living wage, has axed 14 staff posts at three adventure playgrounds, and yet can find £2 million for Boris Bikes (the cost of hiring is due to double this year).

The only response from Wandsworth has been to smear the opponents to destruction, ordinary kids, parents and carers.

The following demand has been issued from local groups, residents and occupiers involved:

We demand the suspension of the demolition of Battersea Park Adventure Playground, pending the holding of a public meeting with a transparent and accountable dialogue and a full consultation by Wandsworth Borough Council of the whole community about the future provision of free, safe, staffed adventurous and accessible play facilities.

This Saturday a fun day at the adventure playground 1400 to 1600 afternoon Saturday 11 January 2012. Attend and join in the fun. Show your opposition to Wandsworth.

Please sign the petition Hands off our Adventure Playgrounds.

Please spread the word and give your support.

We judge a society by how it treats its children.

• Benefit cuts
• Wandsworth residents fight Battersea Park Adventure Playground changes
• Battersea Park Adventure Playground occupied!
• When Occupy met the mums of a middle-class nappy valley
• Protest over Battersea park refurbishment
• Occupy invades to halt bulldozers at Battersea playground
• Protesters continue Battersea Park occupation for sixth day
• Battersea Park Adventure Playground occupation: almost 9 out of 10 parents and carers said NO to plans in Wandsworth Council’s own survey

The Men Who Made Us Fat (3 of 3)

Jacques Peretti examines assumptions about what is and is not healthy. He also looks at how product marketing can seduce consumers into buying supposed ‘healthy foods’ such as muesli and juices, both of which can be high in sugar.

He speaks with Simon Wright, an ‘organic consultant’ for Sainsbury’s in the 1990s, who explains how the food industry cashed in on the public’s concerns around salmonella, BSE and GM crops. By 1999 the organic industry was worth over £605M, a rise of 232% within two years.

How did the mainstream food producers compete? Peretti speaks with Kath Dalmeny, former policy director at the Food Commission, who explains some of the marketing strategies used by mainstream food producers to keep our custom.

The programme also explores the impact of successive government initiatives and health campaigns, such as the proposal of ‘traffic light labelling’, the introduction of which the food industry lobbied hard against.

But in 2012, when we have an Olympic Games sponsored by McDonalds and Coca Cola, has anything changed?

Third part of three-part series on BBC 2, The Men Who Made Us Fat (July 2012).

When people became concerned at the food they were eating, to the food industry saw it as a new market opening up, the opportunity to market us yet more junk food, only this time labelled as ‘healthy’ and so could be sold at a premium.

Consumers are being mislead into buying food labelled healthy which is not healthy.

Sunny Delight was marketed as a healthy drink for kids. It was sugary water full of colouring and additives.

Supermarkets were keen to promote organic, not because they cared about our health or the health of the planet but because they could get away with a bigger mark up.

By 2001, obesity in the UK had doubled in men and trebled in women. And it was rising

Two years later WHO published a ground-breaking report that said the food industry marketing to children high calorie foods and the increased consumption of sugary drinks was having a major impact on obesity.

Cadbury’s introduced a marketing scheme where kids would gorge themselves on chocolate and get vouchers for sports equipment for their schools. They would need to spend many times what the sports equipment would cost if bought direct and in the meantime get very fat.

Cadbury’s are one of the sponsors of the London 2012 Olympics. As are McDonald’s and Coca-Cola.

The food industry has spent an estimated in excess of one billion euros lobbying the European Parliament to stop effective food labelling that would advise consumers they were eating junk food bad for their health.

A traffic light system makes it very clear to shoppers what food is good, what food is bad. The very last system the food industry wants to see in place.

A Harvard Business School study showed that people would eat a foot long sandwch from Subway thinking they had made a healthy choice (it contained 50% more calories than a Big Mac!). Worse still they would then indulge in a fattening desert thinking it ok because thinking they had just made a healthy eating choice they thought they had some leeway to indulge themselves.

People are getting fatter because they believe they are eating healthier foods.

Health Secretary Andrew Landsley was an executive director of marketing company Profero whose clients include Pizza Hut, Pepsi and Mars. He drew up a policy on obesity with the major players of the food industry. This would be like putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank.

Landsley is in bed with the food industry when it comes to health in much the same way as he is in bed with the private health sector when it comes to destroying the NHS.

• The Men Who Made Us Fat (1 of 3)
• The Men Who Made Us Fat (2 of 3)

Fructose sweet white and deadly

fructose sweet white and deadly

Fructose is fruit sugar. It comes from fruit.

Complex sugars like sucrose can be broken down into simpler sugars, glucose and fructose.

If fructose comes from fruit, then it must be natural. If it is natural then it must be good for us.

That is what the food industry would like us to believe.

I was in Holland & Barrett, a health food store, at least that is what they would like us to think.

At the back of the store boxes of pure fructose. I was reminded of boxes of washing powder. It would probably be safer to eat washing powder, certainly safer to eat the box.

Why not simply serve the customers rat poison? The end result will be the same.

Fructose is deadly!

No child wants to be obese. No child gets up in the morning and shouts Mam, I want to be fat. No child wants to be bullied at school for being overweight.

Why then do parents abuse their children by taking them to the local McVomit, stuff them with sugary treats, give them Coke to drink?

We have an epidemic of childhood obesity, we have kids with type 2 diabetes a disease of late middle age. We have an epidemic of obesity in 6-month old babies!

It may surprise most people to learn that children do not exercise less than they used to. Children do not become fat because they exercise less. They exercise less because they are fat.

We are eating more. Gluttony.

This is a biochemical and psychological problem.

McDonald’s showed in the 1970s, if you give people bigger portions they eat more, and there appears to be no limit. Supersize everything, the food is cheap, the profits go up, but so does the calorie intake.

The calorie intake is in the carbohydrates, the sugars, not the fats.

We are eating more, but what we are eating more of is calorie dense, thus we are hit with a double whammy.

High Fructose Corn Syrup. Obtained from maize. Advantage to the drinks industry is that it is cheap. They switched from sucrose to HFCS. The net result that in the US is 63 pound per person.

Fructose is sweeter. If we give sucrose a base index of 100. On the same measure HFCS 120, fructose 173

We are increasing our total food intake, we are increasing the amount of sugar.

Agricultural policy is that food should be cheap. But cheap food comes at a high cost, high environmental cost, animal welfare, junk food.

High Fructose Corn Syrup. Cheap so replaces sucrose. But gets in everywhere because it is cheap.

Fruit juices are problematic. Healthy yes, but high in sugar, or can be.

Grams of sugar per 100ml

• pomegranate juice 12.4
• red grape and raspberry juice 11.5
• orange juice 10.0
• coconut water 4.8

Pomegranate juice is known to be high in sugar, that is why the advice is no more than one glass a day.

An athlete after a burst of activity will have burnt down the energy store held in the liver. High energy or sports drinks are designed to replenish the depleted energy levels in the liver. Do we see elite athletes drinking these drinks? No. We see fat kids drinking them because they have been brainwashed into thinking it is cool.

A legacy of the London 2012 Olympics is that more people will get more exercise. Sheer and utter nonsense. Sat watching the Olympics on TV does not incline one to get up and be active.

Two of the sponsors of the London 2012 Olympics are McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. What message does that send?

Eat less fat. Junk low fat foods are high in sugar.

In the home, food from fresh ingredients, we can control what we eat.

With processed food, cut the fat and it tastes crap, so replace the fat with sugar. Low fat processed food is high in sugar, which usually means high in High Fructose Corn Syrup

Fructose suppresses the signals to the brain that says I am no longer hungry. Thus if a kid drinks a can of coke in a fast food restaurant, a huge intake of calories, far from feeling satiated and having no appetite, can actually eat more.

A can or bottle of coke is a syrup. Caffeine is a stimulant, it is also a diuretic, meaning we urinate more. This leads to loss of fluid, we feel thirsty and drink more. Also contains salt, the sugar masks the salt. The salt makes us thirsty, we drink more.

Fructose and glucose are simple sugars, but they are not the same. They have different physical structures, they are metabolised in different ways.

The boxes of fructose in Holland & Barrett are labelled fruit sugar. The side panel states it is a natural sugar and advises use to replace sucrose!

Sucrose is 50:50 fructose and glucose.

With my knowledge of plants I can quite easily concoct a delicious but deadly meal.

Tobacco is natural!

• A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain
• Is fructose bad for you?
• How to safeguard your investment in saturated fat
• The Men Who Made Us Fat (1 of 3)
• The Men Who Made Us Fat (2 of 3)
• The Men Who Made Us Fat (3 of 3)

The Men Who Made Us Fat (1 of 3)

Around the world, obesity levels are rising. More people are now overweight than undernourished. Two thirds of British adults are overweight and one in four of us is classified as obese. In the first of this three-part series, Jacques Peretti traces those responsible for revolutionising our eating habits, to find out how decisions made in America 40 years ago influence the way we eat now.

Peretti travels to America to investigate the story of high-fructose corn syrup. The sweetener was championed in the US in the 1970s by Richard Nixon’s agriculture secretary Earl Butz to make use of the excess corn grown by farmers. Cheaper and sweeter than sugar, it soon found its way into almost all processed foods and soft drinks. HFCS is not only sweeter than sugar, it also interferes with leptin, the hormone that controls appetite, so once you start eating or drinking it, you don’t know when to stop.

Endocrinologist Robert Lustig was one of the first to recognise the dangers of HFCS but his findings were discredited at the time. Meanwhile a US Congress report blamed fat, not sugar, for the disturbing rise in cardio-vascular disease and the food industry responded with ranges of ‘low fat’, ‘heart healthy’ products in which the fat was removed – but the substitute was yet more sugar.

Meanwhile, in 1970s Britain, food manufacturers used advertising campaigns to promote the idea of snacking between meals. Outside the home, fast food chains offered clean, bright premises with tempting burgers cooked and served with a very un-British zeal and efficiency. Twenty years after the arrival of McDonalds, the number of fast food outlets in Britain had quadrupled.

First part of three-part series on BBC 2, The Men Who Made Us Fat (June 2012).

The salads looked tasty and delicious, and of course are healthy, the junk food made me feel sick.

Chilling was the amount of internal fat being accumulated.

• The Men Who Made Us Fat (2 of 3)
• The Men Who Made Us Fat (3 of 3)

How to safeguard your investment in saturated fat

McDonald’s

McD’s press button to open the door, less exercise

It is the parents who have to take responsibility for what their children eat. — McDonald’s

As a company over many years, we have promoted a healthy active lifestyle. — McDonald’s

Why needlessly expend energy on opening a door?

Why waste that investment in saturated fat?

McDonald’s is here to help you,

McDonald’s is here to help safeguard your careful investment in saturated fat.

McDonald’s has installed a button to open the door. No longer do you need to needlessly expend energy. No longer do you need to worry about that careful investment in saturated fat.

You can always rely on McDonald’s to help safeguard your investment in saturated fat.

In the 1970s, less than 2% of adults in UK were obese.

Obesity has trebled in the UK since the 1980s.

By the mid-90s, more than one in ten children in the UK were obese.

Children are developing type-2 diabetes, a disease of late middle age (it used to be known as maturity onset diabetes).

60% of adults in the UK are overweight or obese.

Obesity is costing the NHS over £4 billion a year.

Annual health bill in the US for obesity approaching $150 billion.

In the US, one-third of the population is clinically obese.

It is not only saturated fat that is the problem, sugar is too.

• The Men Who Made Us fat
• What caused the obesity crisis in the West?
• The Men Who Made Us Fat: Are you TOFI?
• Attempting to tackle the ‘super-sized’ fried breakfast
• Fructose sweet white and deadly
• Belching Out the Devil
• Fat Land
• Fast Food Nation
• Not on the Label
• Supersize Me

Block the Bridge

Save our NHS - Westminster Bridge

Block the Bill - Westminster Bridge

Sunday afternoon people from all over the country occupied Westminster Bridge in protest at cuts and privatisation of the National Health Service.

On the eve of the protest I thought, why not the police let protesters occupy the bridge, it is after all public highway. For once intelligent policing, and that is what happened. Maybe because the police facing 20% cuts and in the same boat. Sadly though they did blot their copy book later by directing protesters off the bridge into a kettle on Lambeth Bridge.

Coverage of Block the Bridge by BBC Radio 4 news was a disgrace. A brief mention on a couple of on-the-hour two-minute news bulletins and that was it.

No mention on the garbage Westminster Hour. The real world occupies Westminster Bridge and yet not a mention. Nor a mention on the midnight news.

- We won’t take this lying down: Thousands of demonstrators force Westminster Bridge to close with protest over Government health reforms

I recall my grandmother talking about days before the NHS, dreading anyone falling ill and a visit from the doctor and having to pay the doctor. We do not wish to see a return to those grim days.

- I remember a pre-NHS Britain. I don’t want to see a post-NHS one

But already, in Yorkshire, patients are being charged for minor surgery. They are referred to a private company which surprise surprise, they find is owned by their own company.

In Farnborough, doctors and dentists have been told to refer patients to a hospital in Basingstoke, not the nearby Frimley Park. Patients are being denied patient choice and when they try to exercise that choice are being told they have to go to Basingstoke.

- Farnborough patients denied patient choice

Yes, there are need for reforms. Consultants should be stopped from using the NHS to tout for business. Sorry a three month wait, but if you wish to bribe me, oops I mean pay me, you can be seen next week as my private patient.

Learned helplessness

The American psychologist Martin Seligman’s foundational experiments and theory of learned helplessness began at University of Pennsylvania in 1967, as an extension of his interest in depression.

A person should be able to walk away from an abusive relationship, for example, or voluntarily quit a stressful job.

A psychological condition known as learned helplessness, however, can cause a person to feel completely powerless to change his or her circumstances for the better.

The result of learned helplessness is often severe depression and extremely low self-esteem.

Learned helplessness can be seen as a mechanism some people employ in order to survive difficult or abusive circumstances.

An abused child or spouse may eventually learn to remain passive and compliant at the hands of his or her abuser, since efforts to fight back or escape appear futile.

Learned helplessness results from being trained to be locked into a system. The system may be a family, a community, a culture, a tradition, a profession or an institution.

Initially, a system develops for a specific purpose. But as a system evolves, it increasingly tends to organize around beliefs, perspectives, activities and taboos that serve the continuation of the system. Awareness of the original purpose fades and the system starts to function automatically. It calcifies.

Some experts suggest learned helplessness can be passed on through observation, as in the case of a daughter watching her abused mother passively obey her husband’s commands.

The daughter may begin to associate passivity and low self-esteem with the “normal” demands of married life, leading to a perpetuation of the learned helplessness cycle.

Child abuse by neglect can be a manifestation of learned helplessness: when parents believe they are incapable of stopping an infant’s crying, they may simply give up trying to do anything for the child.

Another example of learned helplessness in social settings involves loneliness and shyness. Those who are extremely shy, passive, anxious and depressed may learn helplessness to offer stable explanations for unpleasant social experiences.

A third example is aging, with the elderly learning to be helpless and concluding that they have no control over losing their friends and family members, losing their jobs and incomes, getting old, weak and so on.

This was originally posted by Paulo Coelho on his blog. It stimulated quite a debate. Please check out the heart-rendering comments as readers post their traumatic stories

National Health Service Reforms

I can’t stand rap, but there are exceptions. The Andrew Lansley Rap is brilliant. Do I detect hints of House of the Rising Sun?

The so-called reforms of the National Health Service have nothing to do with improving the service provided to patients, it is about privatisation by the back door.

When you go to see your local doctor and he or she recommends a course of treatment or gives you advice, you hope that your doctor has your best interest at heart, not that you are prescribed a drug with one eye on the conference in Barbados that Big Pharma has promised. Now you wil have an additional worry, is that course of treament because the doctor or his practice profits from it, that he has referred you to a consortium in which your doctor has a stake.

There is a need for reform. Currently patients are getting a better service from walk in clinics than they are getting from their own local practice.

It should not be necessary to sit on a long waiting list when you need to see a specialist at a hospital.

Waiting times for knee and hip surgery is growing. Those in need of an operation wait in pain, the outcome is not as good as it would have been without the long wait.

The biggest refom needed is of consultants working within the NHS for whom the NHS is a gravy train. Either they work in the NHS (for which they are paid for 20 hours) or they work in the private sector. But they cannot be allowed to use the NHS to tout for private business, to use NHS services for their private patients. It is insulting to be told by a consulant, well there is a long wait, but should you wish to see me privately ….

Pressure works. The ConDem governement is already backing down on NHS reforms.

David Cameron and Nick Clegg say they are listening. If they are listening then heed the message, scrap the NHS Reforms!

But it is not only on NHS reforms where Andrew Lansley is at odds with public health. He attacked Jamie Oliver for trying to improve school meals, he can see no reason to control what goes into junk food or restricting sales, and as for respected medical journals, well these can be dismissed out of hand.

So who does Lansley listen to? Maybe the private health care industry who will benefit from his back-door privatisation, who have already had the windfall of juicy government contracts. A mere coincidence of course that Lansely and the Tory party have been in receipt of donations from the self-same sector!

I was poorly whilst in Puerto de la Cruz in Tenerife. I had no problems seeing a doctor the same day. The first visit I had to return in the afternoon, the second time wait 20 minutes until the doctor was free. The consultation was not rushed, the prescription was free.

Yes, the National Health Sevice is in need of reform. Back-door privatisation where the only ones to profit are private care providers is not reform. We do not want a US-style health service where the patients suffer and the only beneficiaries are the private health care companies.

Shock doctrine: Use the Budget Deficit as an excuse to push through slash and burn of public services.

Approval ratings for the NHS are the highest they have ever been, waiting times have fallen. What problem therefore are these reforms designed to solve, other than to syphon public funds into the private sector?

More information from Big Society NHS, UK UnCut and False Economy on why ConDen NHS Reforms are bad for our health, bad for our pocket.

- Captain SKA – Liar Liar
- Tax dodger Boots turned into a field hospital
- We are all in it together
- Andrew Lansley on Food and Obesity
- Far from cutting debt, Osborne’s plans will make it soar
- Surgeons raise alarm over waiting
- Cuts are not the cure
- Why austerity is not common sense
- Will the cuts work? Just look at Ireland
- Ireland the Model
- Why cuts are the wrong cure

Flu Attack! How A Virus Invades Your Body

When you get the flu, viruses turn your cells into tiny factories that help spread the disease. In this animation, NPR’s Robert Krulwich and medical animator David Bolinsky explain how a flu virus can trick a single cell into making a million more viruses.

Sunday evening my throat started to hurt. Monday I felt none too good. By Tuesday very poorly.

I am now very very poorly with bronchitis. Coughing very badly, much worse at night.

Bronchitis is an infection of the main airways of the lungs (bronchi), which causes them to become inflamed. It is common in winter and often develops following a cold, sore throat or flu. The main symptom of bronchitis is a cough, which may bring up yellow-grey mucus. Bronchitis may also cause a sore throat, wheezing and a blocked nose. Cause can be virus or bacteria. It can develop into pneumonia. Not a good sign when you start coughing up blood! Nor a good sign when you have repeated bouts of bronchitis.

Rest, warmth and plenty of fluids help recovery. And do not go out in the cold. Living in a cold, damp house does not help.

Drinking hot soups is good as you get plenty of fluids and nutrition.

Healing mentally ill patients with feng shui

flower petals

One of the reasons I love my job is that I am able to help people.

A while ago, I did a consultation for a Care Home for the Mentally ill. When I was performing my consultation I met some of the patients, some were a little aggressive, some blank and some in a completely different world. I felt very sad for them and had this real desire to make them all well. I spent almost the whole day at the Care Home, doing my readings, calculations assessing the form etc. I did not want to leave till I was sure that I would be able to make a difference.

The Care Home looked after about 70 patients. They had huge gardens but the gardens were in a terrible way, the grass was overgrown and the paving all broken. When I looked at the bedrooms they were all very bright yang clashing colours, for example; red and black, blue and pink, yellow and purple etc. I asked the Director of the Care Home why she had selected these colours and she told me since many of these patients were long term they had selected their own bedroom colours. Well this made complete sense to me, colours such as these can make a normal person unbalanced and unfocused and these patients were already of that mindset so the colours they selected reflected their minds.

I made all the necessary feng shui changes. I selected calm serene colours that would settle their minds instead of aggravating them. I focused on the gardens and created the most beautiful zen garden with a gazebo and a calm peaceful water-feature.

I was so impressed with the transformation when I went to view the Care Home a month after when all the changes had been made. The Director was very happy and told me there was a serious reduction in the amount of violent incidents and that the patients had taken very well to the renovations especially the garden.

However, about six weeks after my visit I got another call from the Director, this time she was very stressed. She told me that many of the patients had now got well and had left and she was now losing money since to get new patients was not that easy since the competition was very tough from neighbouring Care Homes. I pacified her and told her how amazing this really was, the feng shui was working beautifully. I told her she would not go unrewarded since now the patients were getting better the reputation of her Care Home would get even better and more people would send their loved ones there so that they could recover. Well as I had said to her it came true. Now she is very busy making lots of money but much more importantly the patients are actually recovering and going back to their families.

For me a result like this is worth more than any money in the world!

From the blog of my friend Priya Sher.