Woman's Hour - What kind of relationship do you have with food?

Episode Date: May 6, 2019

What kind of relationship do you have with food? Do you have a tendency to restrict what you eat, to go on diets, to worry about your weight? Do you worry about your children’s eating habits? Do you put some foods on a pedestal and demonise others? Perhaps you have NO issues about food, and have never worried about what you or your children eat. Either way we want to hear from you. Tweet or email us in the usual way and the number to call is 03700 100444. Lines are open from 9am Monday morning. Laura Thomas, a registered nutritionist who specialises in non-diet nutrition, joins Jane in the studio.Presenter: Jane Garvey Interviewed guest: Laura Thomas Producer: Lucinda Montefiore

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hi, this is Jane Garvey. This is the Woman's Hour podcast from May the 6th, 2019. It's Bank Holiday Monday in the UK today. And this programme is a phone-in about our relationship with food, about healthy eating, about how we regard food, about the place of food in our lives. There's a bit about

diet. Anyway, listen to the conversation and it kind of meanders along through various subject matters loosely related to food and how we approach it. And my guest is a nutritionist, Laura Thomas. Let's hear how the show started. Hello, good morning. We're live for a phone-in on Bank Holiday Monday and we need you. 03700 100 444. We're talking this morning about food and about eating and how we feel about food, how our relationship with food might have an impact on the rest of the family, how if we have young children in the house, how our relationship with food can cause them to have a particular sort of relationship with food. And I know we've got at least one caller already lined up who says she just doesn't have an issue with food, never has had one. It's just not a thing. So what about you? Do you restrict what you eat? Might you be on a diet now? Have you always been

on a diet of one sort or another? Why? Do you make a resolution in the morning that this is the day you're going to start eating well or properly, whatever that means? And are you concerned about what your children eat? Now, my guest this morning is nutritionist Laura Thomas. Welcome to the program, Laura. How are you? Good morning. Well, thank you for having me. Well, it's great to have you on. And I know you've got loads of really interesting stuff to say and you've got your own thoughts that we're going to weave into the show today. 03700 100 444. Social media, Instagram or Twitter.

It's at BBC Woman's Hour. Or you can email the programme via the website. That's bbc.co.uk slash Woman's Hour. Now, one of the reasons we wanted to do this today was because of the pretty astonishing reaction actually last week that we had to an interview that I did with Sophie Hagen, who's a Danish comedian who has totally embraced the term fat. Sophie says she's fat and she's happy about it. She's written a book called Happy Fat. Here she is on the show last week. Well, I've now learned to kind of overcome all the difficulties. I'm now, you know, happy and fat, which I know is quite rare for people

to feel that way. In general, you know, fat people are oppressed on so many different levels. You know, if I walk down the street, I will often get abuse shouted at me, abuse that I probably can't say this earlier on the BBC or ever on the BBC I'll be spat on or cornered or yeah absolutely how often does that happen oh uh I mean I it it tends to kind of make me not want to go outside that much so uh but on very active weeks yeah it'll I don't know once a a month, twice a month maybe. You know, I have the knowledge that fat people get hired less than thin people. We get paid less than thin people.

You know, I can't really turn on the television and watch anything without fat people being the ridicule and the punchline to any kind of joke. You know, you turn on the news and you see these headless fatties walking down the street with like obesity epidemic written everywhere. So you kind of know you're a very, very hated group in society. Sophie Hagen, and as I say, that inspired an enormous reaction from you. Some very supportive tweets and emails saying they really liked what sophie was saying and the way she said it other people really taking issue with what she said um let's go to the lines and jane joins us from amersham hi jane good morning to you oh hi jane so you are the caller who has no issue with food tell me more it's not really i don't have an issue it's just that i'm not at all interested in the subject i just um eat because you have to eat um you know when you're hungry

uh and i've had it for years i'm not don't go only food shop when i need food i never eat in restaurants because i can't be bothered to sit still for the time it takes for them to cook it um and i only have one dish which i've had since i was 18 which is just like all the vegetables i can find plus a chicken if there's any there fry up and add pasta and we call it um a peasant surprise i don't know what they are in the middle ages but that's what we call it and that's all i do and i've done it for 50 years right and the family are at ease with this are they a? A peasant surprise every night? That's for sure. But then the alternative is they cook it themselves.

So when they were little, they ate it. And now they eat it if they don't cook themselves. Because, I mean, that's always a staple. They know they could always count on that surprise every once in a day. Yeah. OK. Good for you. I think that's definitely one way to operate. Thank jane uh to jacqueline who's who's uh on the wirral hi jacqueline hi so um you want to talk about young mothers don't you um not especially young mothers i really wanted to just uh say the way my mum had dealt with it because I think it can apply. My mum, I grew up in the 50s and if we said to my mum, my brother and I, what's for tea? We always got the reply, win wams for winding up the moon. And it was a little bit infuriating for a couple of seconds, but then we went off and did whatever we were doing.

And what she meant by that was, I am not going to enter into any discussion about what you're going to have for your evening meal. I have shopped for it, prepared it, cooked it, served it up, and I will be washing up, and you will eat what I'm giving you. That's basically what she meant. It's very hard not to have enormous sympathy for her, isn't it? Indeed. And I didn't realize this until years later when I had my own child and she was not an

easy eater. And I would end up almost going down the list like a restaurant. You know, what have we got for dinner? And I would say something that she liked but funnily enough that day she didn't want it oh I don't feel like that so then I'd say oh but we've got this you know perhaps what about that and then I'd end up with having provided a list and she didn't fancy anything that day and I realized that all all this discussion and choice that they get in infant school and junior school from the minute they go in and then secondary school. I was a teacher, so I've seen all this in play. Children are asked to choose from a very, very young age. And they're not always good at that.

They're not always good at that. And it encourages them to think that that is the way to do it. And if you go around a supermarket and you see a mum with a trolley and a toddler sitting at the front, very often they're saying, what would you like? Would you like this? Would you like that? And I think they think that they are being really lovely communicative people but by the time those children get to being 12 13 14 they're used to choosing absolutely everything thank you thank you very much Jacqueline I think Jackie who's in London is thinking along similar lines Jackie I know you don't mind me saying you are in your 80s good morning to you yes tell me tell me what your. Well, it's just that I grew up, I was born in 1936.

So during those war years when food was very precious, my father had three allotments, grew stuff down the garden as well. And there was, I have no guilt about food. I eat, and I do stay slim, which is very lucky. But it's not that, it's something more inside my head about food. You're lucky to be having it. Driving children in India, all that stuff. That's what I grew up with.

And I have three children and seven grandchildren. And I see what goes on there. And there is, not everywhere, but there is an amount of guilt around food and problems. I just, and there is such a lot of choice. I don't even really know where to start because it's the whole thing is being brought up respecting food and knowing that there wasn't that much of it. Thank you very much, Jackie. I suspect you'll be speaking for many of our listeners with

that. I just want to mention Twitter, at BBC Women's Hour. This listener says, listening to the lady now about food preparation for kids, we'd always be told dinner is shim-shams for meddlers. And it's what I tell my boys now. Kate is in Ashford. Hi, Kate. Good morning to you. Hello. Good morning. Now, tell me about your son. I have a son who has a syndrome called Prader-Willi syndrome. And one of the characteristics of the syndrome is an inability to control appetite. The reasons aren't fully understood, but certainly at the top end of the spectrum which is where Ollie sits his drive to seek food is probably I imagine akin to the drive that someone who is

addicted to drugs feels and he would take any risk whatsoever in order to acquire food. So what it meant for us growing up was that, whereas for most people, food is very much a part of our social fabric. We meet friends for a coffee and something to eat. We celebrate birthdays or Christmas or Easter. And very often it revolves around food. And that simply wasn't an option with Ollie. Not that simply wasn't an option with Ollie. Not that it wasn't an option. It meant that a lot of difficult choices had to be made about the extent to which he could,

or we as a family, could participate in those events. And the compromises that we had to make in terms of his access to food or otherwise. So it's something that has had a huge bearing on all of our lives now. So it has turned food into what exactly in your household? It's turned it into something that rather than perhaps being seen as a treat or even a something it it's all we've had to downplay it to the point where it is a it is a means to to to eat to stop being hungry to to survive what to survive and that's it it's as simple as that and as brutal as that so we've lived with a young man i mean he's in his 20s now whose addiction is to something that is essential to all of us to live. And that has made things extremely difficult at times.

Having said that, he is now very settled in a specialist care home and is doing extremely well. But it really has fundamentally changed our view of food, which I find very sad, actually. So can I just ask very briefly, you haven't rediscovered the joy in it then? Yes, I think probably it would be fair to say that we all are now. Ollie has two sisters. And so even the small pleasure of sitting down with a cake or a biscuit and a cup of coffee, which I will probably do in a minute, is something that we tended not to do when he was living at home and growing up for all kinds of reasons.

So, yes, I think probably we are now rediscovering the joy of food. Really interesting to get your insight. Thank you very much, Kate. I've been looking, Laura Thomas is our guest. She's a registered nutritionist. Looking at your website and your bio, Laura, you yourself, you're very honest. You say, I haven't always had a super healthy attitude towards food and eating I have eaten because I was lonely I've eaten because I didn't like my job I've not eaten because my boyfriend dumped me I've counted calories and I've tried weird juice cleansers

so you've been there yeah absolutely 100% been there done that probably time for me to update my website. You're happier now, aren't you? Yeah, I definitely have a healthy relationship with food now. And I think that this is something that probably a lot of your listeners might be able to relate to, which is something that is fairly widespread that a lot of women in particular, but other groups as well, have a very complicated relationship with food. Certainly, that's a lot of the people that I see in my practice, where there's a back and forth in their heads about good foods and bad foods and what to eat and when to eat and how much to eat. And if I eat this cookie, does that mean that I have to then go and do another three miles run

when I work out? And there's this constant back and forth and bargaining and negotiating with ourselves. And it can become really exhausting for us. Well, and a lot of women in particular resent. I'm just looking at our next caller. In fact, let's bring her in, actually. Adele in Kingston. Hi, Adele. Good morning. Hi, good morning. You're just bored with food, aren't you? Completely. If I could just pop a pill, as the astronauts do, that would just take care

of it and then I could get on with my life. Is it because you're in charge of planning, prep, buying? Yeah, the buying, the planning, the menu, the food, who will eat what, the preparing, the constant every day, three meals a day plus snacks.

It's just just let me let me out. How old are your teenagers? Well, my son has just turned 20 and my daughter is 18. Yeah, I mean, teenage lads, you can't fill them, can you? No, hollow legs, literally. You mentioned snacks. Now, are snacks, strictly speaking, necessary? I'm a snacker myself. Of course they're not.

Of course they aren't. We never had snacks when we grew up, but it's just the kids, when they're studying, they just want to be able to graze through the day. And who am I to deny that? No, believe me, I'm as weak-willed as you, Adele. But you're right. I didn't have snacks growing up.

They weren't a thing. You ate your meals and that was it. So we've all, I mean, we're perhaps rather doting parents. We've been mugs, haven't we? Yes, a little bit, yes. But you also have this major responsibility that you're responsible for the health of your children. And if you don't give them the correct food, you know, and they get something down the line, then it's your fault.

Yeah. And it's a way of showing love. Absolutely. Giving food and sometimes giving food that isn't strictly necessary. Thank you, Adele. So what about snacks, Laura? So I think there is no right or wrong answer here. I think it's completely down to individual preference. I know that some people that I see in clinic will do this thing where they try and be good all day. And so they will have a small breakfast, maybe a salad for lunch. And then

when they get home and it hits seven o'clock they're sort of face first into the fridge standing up eating something over the sink and so for that person I would say actually we need to be getting some snacks in your day and just balance out your day a little bit but I think what we're talking about here really is children and I think that that snacks can be helpful for quite a few reasons for children. First of all, especially younger children, their their stomachs are quite small. And so making them go for long periods of meals, for instance, in between, or long periods of time in between meals might be too long, especially for young children. It's also another opportunity to get some nutrition into them, whether that is just, you know, some energy to help them grow or some more nutrient dense foods, then that having that opportunity to snack could be quite important. The ultimate useful, healthy, in quotation marks, snack for a toddler or a small child would be? I would try and go for something that's a bit balanced. So some protein, some fats and some carbohydrates.

So it could be some cheese with some apple slices or it could be some crackers with cheese, for instance. But Adele made a good point there and a lot of people will have agreed with her. And it was the same for me growing up. We didn't have these. I wasn't handed a couple of carrot batons at half ten, eleven o'clock. I was told to hang on. Why was that okay then and isn't acceptable now? Well, and again, every family and every child is going to be slightly different and it's hard to kind of draw conclusions without knowing a little bit more information. But like I said, going for long stretches of time might not be particularly helpful. And the other thing that

I would be concerned about is what if that child is genuinely hungry? What we are teaching them then is not to respond to their body's cues that actually they can't listen to their internal cues and they should be going by external cues like the clock, like the size of their plate. So we're actually undermining that innate trust that children tend to have in their bodies from a young age. I'm not surprised that Hayley on Twitter has mentioned social media. She says it has a huge and detrimental effect on how women eat. You can curate your feed to serve you nothing but disordered eating posts that spur you on to diet. Yeah, sounds horrendous. There's an interesting study, if I can just jump in, that

showed that people that were following, this is from UCL, where they were looking at people who followed healthy living accounts on social media and found that 90% of that sample had characteristics that were in line with a diagnosis of orthorexia nervosa, so an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating. I think we can talk to Marilyn, who's in North Wales. Marilyn, good morning to you. Oh, good morning. Now, I know you've already told one of my colleagues that you are bulimic.

Is that right? Yes, and probably I have been since my 40s after I had my second child. I have quite a toxic relationship with food. Your contributor used the phrase constant negotiation, and that's what I do. I'm on the 5-2 diet, so for two days a week I fast and it's very very strict and it's it's delightfully sparse on those two days now last week on the Thursday I was supposed to be on on you know on my fasting and I had a I had a croissant with some friends and immediately felt guilty, absolutely, totally guilty, because I'd eaten that pastry that really I shouldn't have done. And so there's this constant swings and roundabouts the whole time and food becomes a toxic issue. And do you think it's been that way for, did you say, have you any idea?

I'm 71 in July. And it started. I, you know, I've been, I put weight on after I had my second child in my 40s. And I've been fighting it ever since. And now it's a health issue because I have arthritis and I have to lose weight in order to have an op. And it's tough. I've lost quite a lot of weight, but it's a constant battle. And Marilyn, it does really sound as though this is governing your life to an extent, which is not acceptable, is it? Laura, what would you say to Marilyn?

Well, first of all, I would really encourage Marilyn to to if she hasn't already reach out and get some professional support from um from the the eating disorder perspective maybe looking at the beat the eating disorder charity website i think that is absolutely essential because um especially if your doctors aren't aware that you have this eating disorder they're not they need to know because otherwise they're going to keep pushing you down that route of dieting. And we know that it sounds like without being able to do a full clinical assessment, it sounds like that is driving the binge type behavior. because nobody should feel guilty for eating. It's a fundamental requirement for living. And you had a croissant, for goodness sake. On a fasting diet, you're only allocated 500 calories across the day. So if you have a croissant, you've blown that.

But Marilyn, just to hear you using terms like this it's just absolutely not enough food to keep somebody going and and the problem is that this is normalized the 5-2 diet and other diets very similar to intermittent fasting and all these kinds of things are just so ubiquitous at this point and we consider them to be healthy but there's absolutely nothing healthy about that binge restrict pattern and just getting caught in that cycle and going round and round the merry-go-round trying to find the next best diet and the other thing that's that's really interesting you know that we've had a lot of conversations um a lot of listeners saying oh diets work it's just it's just a matter of willpower

we actually have very strong evidence that in the long term diets don't work. And that's not really something that's controversial within nutritional science. And, you know, one thing, just one consequence of diets is that it can deplete serotonin, that sort of hormone that makes us happy and improves our mood and our body image. And so if you're diet dieting depleting your serotonin levels then you're making it more likely that you will turn to food to get some comfort and support marilyn honestly that's the that's the uh often as i explained to your researcher people range in a spectrum of anorexic normal to bulimic and if you are bulimic and you're under stress the chances are that you will eat something in order to comfort yourself and i i complete completely aware that it's totally

unhealthy psychologically i really hope things do do get better for you marilyn thank you oh cheers i'm sure it will well thanks for being so honest um because okay i hope it helps someone else well exactly and that's why i'm particularly grateful to you thank you very much um yes let's just briefly a couple of emails i want to read out oh three seven hundred one hundred four four four is the number to call we're talking this is live this is woman's hour it's bank holiday monday we're talking about our relationship with food and my guest is laura thomas who is a registered nutritionist um this is interesting from christine and this is in reference, it's an email in reference to the conversation I had with Sophie Hagen last week.

What rubbish, this woman just eats too much, said Christine. Of course diets work, and this is the killer bit of the email. I'm permanently dieting, and I exercise every day. I'm 73, and I'm nine stone ten pounds. And here's another email on the subject of willpower from a listener. We don't need to mention her name. I'm lying in bed. I'm size 22 and I weigh 20 stone. I am five foot 11. I'm enraged by Sophie Hagen saying that diets don't work. They do. It's our willpower that lets us down. Slimming World is amazing. Weight Watchers is amazing. Our bodies are not designed to be fat. What stops diets is our willpower. And we just

can't continue the sensible eating. So Laura, what you said, you're fighting, it's an uphill battle to get that message across, isn't it? Absolutely. I think there's a very pervasive idea that dieting is really easy. It's just a matter of calories in versus calories out. And that really, it doesn't do justice to how complicated our bodies are. And we have fairly good evidence. Actually, there was a meta-analysis that came out the year before last, which is a collection of smaller studies. And it was looking at programs like Slimming World, programs like Weight Watchers, which are recommended on the NHS. And what it found was that 60% of people failed to lose the 5% of weight loss that is considered to be clinically significant in the first place. And then if we take that together with some other evidence that sort of suggests that actually within five years, people tend to put on 70 to 80 percent of the weight that they have lost. So most people fail to lose weight in the first place. And then when they do, they tend to put it back on.

This isn't a controversial idea within science. It's very well established that it's easy to lose weight in the short term. But in longer term, it's much harder to keep it off. And that's partly, well, it's largely due to changes that are taking place in our bodies, not just a lack of willpower. So when we go on a diet, when we suppress our energy intake below its requirements, our appetite gets dialed up, our hunger hormones get switched on, and our metabolism slows down concurrently. So we've got these two forces taking place in our body. And that's biology's way of defending

what is called our set point weight. We've got a doctor who's been listening, Dr. Jenny Goodman. Hi, Jenny. Good morning to you. Hello. Good morning. Now, what do you want to say? I guess, I mean, you're a GP, are you, Jenny? No, I specialise in nutritional medicine. OK, go on. So what I wanted to add was the social dimension. The conversation thus far has been as though each person struggling with their relationship to food

is an individual in a bubble and the issues are all their personal issues. What needs saying is that this is to do with our environment, our sugar-loaded, junk food-loaded environment. That wherever we look, and it wasn't the case 50 years ago, there are sugary snacks and junk food and adverts for sugary snacks and junk food targeted at people of all ages. And that we are almost powerless to resist them because sugar is very, very addictive. And we're programmed by evolution to crave sugar. Breast milk is very sweet. And that's an evolutionary tendency that made sense thousands of years ago in hunter-gatherer times. But doesn't make any sense now.

Okay, Laura wants to say something. Yeah, I just want to pick up on this point around the concept of sugar addiction because it's actually been fairly, well's there's a lack of evidence to support this idea that people are addicted to sugar in the same way that they are addicted to cocaine or heroin and so for instance people often point to animal experiments that show that rats will will drink water that's laced with sugar over water that's laced with an addictive drug. And what gets often missed out of these conversations is that actually those rats have been fasted for 12 to 24 hours before they are exposed to these solutions. And therefore, you know, if I had been starved for 12 to 24 hours

beforehand, I would go crazy for some sugar water as well. It's like drinking Lucozade. Jenny? Yeah, I mean, I would agree that the mechanism is completely different from drug addiction. The neurological mechanism, of course, is different. But the effect is the same, in that we are programmed by evolution to go for sweet things, which would, you know, in Stone Age times have been the occasional piece of fruit from a tree. But we wouldn't have had access to the vast amount that we have access to now. So, for example, your earlier conversation about how was it in the 60s and 70s as kids none of us needed snacks between meals,

partly because they weren't there, but mostly because we ate proper meals. Now, you were describing earlier somebody has a skimpy breakfast, a skimpy lunch, and therefore does need to snack. I actually think if we went back to three full meals a day and had the time and the mindset to sit down and chew them properly and enjoy them, we would be less vulnerable to the pull, to the sweet stuff. But we would still be vulnerable to it to an extent because it's there. And I think the discussion should include something about advertisers and the vast millions and billions of amounts of money made by the manufacturers of food,

much of it junk food and sugar-laced food that we actually don't need at all. Can I just bring in a listener called Sam who's on Twitter? He says, the outrage from all sides that Sophie Hagen, the Danish comedian, provokes simply for taking a neutral stance towards her fat body tells us everything we need to know about our collective attitude to food and body shape. So a quick word from you, Jenny, on how we regard or have been encouraged to regard fat people in our society. It's a very, very difficult one. If you go back a few decades to Susie Orbach's groundbreaking book, Fat is a Feminist Issue, she was saying something fairly similar to what Sophie Hagen says, which is, can we drop the judgmentalness

and can we change our attitude to food so that we stop categorising it as good food, bad food, and stop guilt-tripping ourselves? And my point is, that's fine, would be fine, in a neutral food environment, but it is virtually impossible for most of us in an environment saturated with junk food, which I do think is addictive and designed to be addictive because that's so profitable. OK, thank you very much. That's the view of Jenny. Sarah on Twitter, thanks for bringing the subject of children's eating habits

and relationships to food to the show lots of emphasis on the role of women don't forget the role of men and dads in children's eating habits

and self esteem from Sarah eating sensibly is great and helps me feel good about myself but running three times a week makes me feel great

our problem with food is our sedentary lifestyle says sarah uh from a listener in i'm assuming they're in chorley in lancashire i've just won lancashire's chippy of the year business awards i congratulations i study food and believe weight gain can only be by hypoglycemic carbs being converted by insulin release. Eating fat won't make you fat. What do you think of that, Laura? It's true, actually. Eating fat doesn't make you fat, does it? No. Again, this is a complicated question to answer. But ultimately, the way that we gain weight or lose weight is it doesn't depend on the specific macronutrients in our diet, which oftentimes people think. So whether it's carbohydrate,

protein or fat, it's more to do with the total energy intake. Now, that can also be complicated by the fact that we if we are on a diet and suppressing our energy intake, that our metabolism will slow down as well. And so you have to consider all of the different factors at play. Let's go to Morgan, who's in Somerset in Glastonbury. Morgan, good morning. How are you? I'm fine. Can you hear me all right? I can, perfectly.

It's got a bit fuzzy from this end. I was really interested in what the doctor just said because i think she's spot on when she talks about the need to look at the social implications because we don't as she said live in bubbles we live in in cultures in environments and i i'm in my 70s and ever since I was in my late 20s I've been obsessed with studying community living and I've visited many communities in Britain and around the world and I went to a community called Findhorn in Scotland years ago and walked into the dining room on the day I arrived and was astonished to see little children at the lunch counter, little ones, four or five-year-old children, piling their plates up with absolutely healthy salad, raw food. Yeah, completely healthy, fresh food. And I thought to myself, my goodness, I'm not going to sit down and eat that whole plate full,

like as if it was sausage and chips in the sort of real world. And lo and behold, they did. They sat up at the table and they ate this food, the relish. That sounds incredibly impressive. I think Vera in Brighton might have enjoyed that, actually. Vera, good morning to you. Oh, good morning. Hello. Now, you have just had a baby. Congratulations. Oh, thank you. He's here with me now. He's just finished feeding himself, actually. All right. How old is he? He's now just over two weeks old, I think, getting on 11. Sorry, two months old,

getting on 11 weeks. You actually, you're so confused, you don't remember how old the baby is. Many people will have been there, Vera, so don't worry about it. Weeks or months, I don't know. Whatever. But you are a vegetarian household, is that right? Well, not so much yet. So I would describe myself, I guess, as a flexitarian, omnivorous. I certainly love meat and fish. And my partner is a vegetarian and has been since he was quite young. So we've always had kind of a bit of a tension in the household. Not necessarily. I mean, I cook vegetarian for us, but I will occasionally buy, say,

good quality free-range chicken or sustainable fish. Which I'm sure you'd be the first to admit you are fortunate enough to be able to do that. Yeah, which means, you know, it's very rarely, but, you know, try to buy sort of make more ethical choices. But I think my sort of challenge around meat eating goes back to my childhood days, actually. It's I have I've attempted to be vegetarian when I was younger. I used to give it up for Lent. And, you know, there were times where for, say, two or three years at a stretch, I would avoid, say, chicken and red meat products. But I never really managed to cut down entirely.

And, you know, I always seem to kind of go back. Some kind of bacon will always sort of tempt me back occasionally. And I even attempted to give up pork products earlier this year and ended up eating pork again. So you have spent quite a bit of your life thinking about food, haven't you? Absolutely. Well, yeah, I mean, I work in food advocacy, so I'm quite passionate about it and certainly do think a lot about it. But, you know, I know that for me, I would I would love to go vegetarian or at least pescatarian, but I've just never really managed it. But, you know, now that we have a little boy, and I think in the current context of, you know, growing awareness of the environmental impact of our food system and our food choices,

you know, my partner and I are thinking very carefully about, you know, how do we want to raise our son? And, you know, in that moment, you know, when a child is still young, you are effectively making food choices for them. Well, of course you are, because they can't make any decisions, can they? Exactly. Okay, thank you very much, Vera. Best of luck to you and to your baby son. To Abby, who's 28.

Hi, Abby. Hi, Anne. Because you two are, well, you're making decisions about how you live your life, aren to Abby, who's 28. Hi, Abby. Hello. Because you two are, well, you're making decisions about how you live your life, aren't you, Abby? Yes, absolutely. Kind of following on from your last caller, I'm of a generation that's grown up buying from supermarkets, mainly for necessity and ease, just kind of going in blindly, picking things up because I want them,

not knowing really where things have come from or how much they've really cost in terms of their journey to be there. And now I'm just trying to make a bit more of an effort to see what carbon emissions any piece of food has that I buy. And I'm trying to not buy plastic as well, which has been really eye-opening and interesting in terms of actually looking at what produce we have in UK supermarkets. It's just crazy.

It comes from Africa, Asia, South America. You know, we're really used to eating bananas and avocados every day. And that's what I used to eat as a vegetarian, just in terms of their nutritional value. I mean, your generation... Sorry to interrupt, but your generation are having that kind of important conversation. We've had earlier callers who were brought up during the Second World War

and when food was rationed, obviously obviously who've grown up with a completely well actually a not dissimilar attitude to your generation in other words they were eating um little and they were glad of it uh and now they they look at our absurd world of plenty and don't quite know how to deal with it but exactly do you think i think it's up it's up to our generation to now make that change again and look at how we how we can go to shops that don't use packaging, how we can take our own containers into place and buy things that are local and seasonal. And that totally changes your attitude because you end up eating much more healthy and it's actually cheaper in the long run. And you end up sort of working out what good nutrients you can get rather than just buying things because they're easy. So it works out well and I hope that we can start to make that change.

Well, thank you very much for that, Abby. Do you think that's right, Laura, that we are on the cusp of something with today's millennials? 28 is a millennial, I think. Are these people necessarily going to eat better because they are making real determined efforts to eat sustainably? I think, again, that's a tricky one. There are a couple of points that I picked out from that caller. The first is I think it's wonderful that particularly millennials are really pushing for more sustainability. And there are a lot of people going vegetarian or vegan.

And of course, that's really, really important. Where the concern comes in for me, well, it's two pronged, actually. First of all, it's an enormous privilege to be able to go out and buy everything from scratch, source foods that don't have plastic, do that research and be able to cook everything I'm thinking about single parents or or people that just don't who are time poor financially poor don't have other resources so so we I would be conscious to try and include them in the conversation as well and and I don't think it's everybody has access to that the second thing that i'm very conscious of because i see it a lot in my clinical practice is people who are going down the route of

a more sustainable diet but they are using it in a similar way that that they were using maybe clean eating and it becomes a way to define clean eating remind me what clean eating it so it's what i talked about briefly earlier this um kind of uh food that that is minimally processed or doesn't have any preservatives or anything added to it so we're really just eating foods that are are completely whole foods which we want you know it's great that we can we can do that most of the time but again it can become it can get to a point where our diets have become so restrictive. And so, for instance, people might be making their own plant-based milks at home from almonds or cashews. You've got to have time on your hands to be able to do that.

Well, there's that, but there's also a nutritional implication there as well, because they're not getting calcium and vitamin B12. And that has implications for health, particularly in later life. Exactly. Can I just ask a really, and it's a great question from Lucy on Twitter. If diets don't work, how do you lose weight if you need to for your health? So I think what we need to do here is unpack and separate out weight and health, because they often get conflated as the same thing. Perhaps Lucy, I don't know Lucy, but maybe she's been told or she knows someone who's been told you need to lose weight. What do

you do? I personally would focus on behaviours. So while being overweight, because like I've said, there's an enormously high failure rate of diets, but we can make improvements to our health without necessarily losing weight. So there's a really lovely study from the US that illustrates this. And they looked at 12,000 people and they wanted to tease apart if people didn't engage in any health promoting habits. And they were looking at really simple things like eating five a day and not smoking. And essentially what they found is that people all across the weight spectrum, if they were engaging in all four of these health-promoting behaviours,

they had the same risk independent of BMI. And I think that's a really important point to hold on to. Nadine on Twitter says, I'm getting quite cross listening to this. I am overweight, but I don't want to be. But mobility issues do make exercise difficult. Yes, I appreciate that, Nadine. Susie is a caller who has, I think, turned to exercise. Susie, good morning to you.

Good morning. So tell me, you do a lot of swimming. I do a lot of swimming, and I've been doing it for the last year, and it's taken me 72 years to find something that works for me. Basically, I've been a yo-yo, love food, 5'11", and sort of varied in weight quite a lot four children um working and all the rest of it but finally found something that works and it's i swim five times a week i do 40 lengths i do breaststroke with my head poking up over the

water i don't do you know fantastic swimming but it works who cares it? It works for you. Exactly. The thing that stops me swimming is the thought of swimming. But I do remember the bit where you get out of the pool and feel fabulous afterwards. Exactly. You're getting that five times a week, Susie. Five times a week. As it happens, tomorrow I won't be swimming. I'll be walking up in Northumberland.

But I'm always doing something. But it's the swimming that I love. And as I say it started a year ago and it was I swam in a lovely pool in the south of France in a green silk pool and I thought this is it and it was I was in a zen bubble and it was just a feel-good thing and over the year you know my my body has changed subtly and so I feel good and I don't look bad. And, you know, that's it. I'm sure you look amazing. I tell you what, I wouldn't mind being in that pool today.

I mean, I love food and I love cooking and all the rest of it. And I love chocolate. But, you know, it means that I probably eat twice a day. So I eat, I can't swim on food. So I eat when I sort of return after I've done a few exercises a few stretches that Susie who's in a good place um not least because she's able to go swimming as I'm sure uh she would acknowledge not always a possibility of course um thanks to everybody who emailed and joined in the conversation on Twitter and Instagram as well. Here's just an upsum, really, of the responses on Instagram,

our Instagram account, to our question today. What kind of relationship do you have with food? And responses from you included gluttonous, the guilt is real, love-hate, complicated, disordered. Love-hate, as an emotional eater, I naturally self-soothe, reward and comfort with food. As I've got older, I'm far

more interested in my health than my appearance. I worry all the time. I should say they are different responses, but it just shows you how everybody, well I said everybody had a relationship with food and then some people perhaps would take issue with that what Laura's still here what do you think about that Laura everybody does have a relationship with food don't they even those who

say they don't they have really yeah well if you eat food I think you have a relationship with it by default but I think what those comments really raised is just how complicated and oftentimes disordered our relationship with food is in the sort of world that we live in at the moment. I read out an email in the show from a woman in her 70s. I think she said she was 73 and she knew exactly how much she weighed. I am not. I'm 54 and I actually I genuinely don't know how much I weigh I'm probably about nine stone but I'm about five foot one um should I should we know how much we weigh when we're in our 70s I mean I think that's a completely a personal choice and decision uh the people that I work with I don't weigh them um i don't i don't want to know my no i was at the doctor um just this week and i asked not to see my weight because

i know it's interesting okay what if you did know your weight what impact why didn't you want to know well i think once upon a time it probably would have dictated my every waking thought i would be stepping on the scales every day and that would determine if i was going to have a good day or a bad day and then that would determine my eating behaviors. And this is something that is echoed among my clients as well. If they stand on the scales and it goes up, then they feel terrible about themselves for the whole day. And our lives shouldn't be dictated by a number on the scale. And what I try and encourage people to do is to think about the bigger picture. Our weight is such a small part of what determines our health. We really need to be focusing on

well-being rather than weight. So thinking about our social health, our, you know, our genetics play a part in our health, but our behaviors are really the key thing. So not smoking, not drinking too much, making sure we're getting plenty of fruits and vegetables and whole grains and taking some physical activity. Let me just bring in some more of the emails. We couldn't really get through them, obviously, on the show. This listener would like to be anonymous. I have no problem with food or my body shape now. However, when I was a small child, I was always urged to eat whatever was put in front of me, even if I was full and the portion was too large. On transitioning from childhood to puberty, I was admonished for clearing my plate,

for being fat, for being a gannet. I was the same weight from age 10 to 20, although I had grown taller and was within so-called normal weight on the chart. For a long time, I was the same weight from age 10 to 20, although I had grown taller and was within so-called normal weight on the chart. For a long time, I was trying to control my weight, size, shape to please other people. My weight problem came from everyone else. Now I'm listening to myself. I'm a lot happier. So that person seems to have got through things. I am a mother. I grew up with a bulimic diabetic mother and it was so stressful.

I really struggle though with my son who's seven. I've nicknamed him the locust. He's small, but he eats constantly and I think he's a sugar addict. We do try to monitor it. We have loads of fruit and veg in the house, but he does extraordinary things like drinking honey. We've tried having no sugar in the house,

but recently he snuck out of the house to the local corner shop when I was loading the dishwasher and my husband was on a work phone call. He took his sister and they spent nearly £50, birthday money, on boxes of chocolate and sweets. We despair and can't trust them. Does Laura have any advice? Oh, I mean, first of all, I'm really sorry that you're having such a,

you're in such a difficult situation. And there are lots of things that I would encourage this family to think about. First of all, this can be difficult, but sometimes, and I think this email sort of suggested that that parent had her own difficult relationship with food or that was role modelled, a difficult relationship with food was role modelled to her. So I'm wondering what her relationship with food is like, maybe holding a mirror up to herself and sort of unpicking some of the things that were in that informed her relationship with food and just trying to understand that a little bit better because children are sponges when it comes to food and so what we whatever we rule model to them is is ultimately what um they're going to

take on board so if we rule model a healthy relationship with food and a healthy balance of foods that's one place to start. This is a more nuanced answer, so I'm not sure if we're going to have time for this. But with parents, I will use something called the division of responsibility in feeding. And this is a model that was developed by a pediatric dietitian in the United States called Ellen Satter. And she breaks down child's eating responsibilities and parents feeding responsibilities. So oftentimes we think as the parent or the guardian of a child that we are responsible for making them eat. We're responsible for providing the structure and

the support to help them eat. But ultimately, it's their responsibility to do the eating if that makes sense. So the division of responsibility for parents involves setting the what, where and when of eating. So you decide which foods come into the house and you can provide, we would encourage you to provide choices within limits. You decide when the child has a snack so you provide that regular structure so that you make sure that the child is coming to the table hungry, let's say. So there's some space between meals and snacks, but not too much space so that they are ravenous. And the when, so that, you know, is that at home at the kitchen table? Is that at a restaurant? Is it at grandparents' house? And then the child determines how much to eat

and whether they're going to eat from the foods offered. So for example, if you have all the different components of the meal out on the table, then you try as much as is age appropriate for that child to select the foods that they want. The reason for that is it takes a bit of pressure off of the child. A child, depending on their developmental age, they're trying to find some autonomy. And if we put a lot of pressure on a child to eat a particular food, their instinct is going to be to rebel and push back against you. So they're going to turn into fussy eaters. Right. It's interesting. In Sophie Hagen's life, there was a complicated aspect.

Her grandparents were, I think we'd call them feeders. They didn't know they were, but they certainly were. And then her mom had another daughter who needed more extra nutrition because she'd been rather ill. What do you do in situations where one generation of the family takes one view and one tack and you as the parent or carer might feel rather differently? Yeah, so I think it's as much as you can having those difficult conversations. And it can be really difficult. Yeah, it's really difficult. And so having that conversation with the caretakers of this is how we want to say we're following the division of responsibility, for example. We don't want to put certain foods up on a pedestal and call them bad.

Because what we know is that actually sometimes even when we tell a child that a food is healthy, it causes them to eat less of that food. There are some studies demonstrating that. Likewise, if we elevate a food onto a pedestal and say, well, this is a treat or this is a reward, it can actually make the child think that there's something really interesting, really exciting about that food. And then they're more likely to eat more of that food than they actually need. So with the parent with the sugar, maybe bringing food down off of bringing sugar down off of a pedestal and just being a bit more neutral about all foods. Zach makes a good point, points out that it's Ramadan today and Zach has started fasting, no food or drink or smoking, etc. from four in the morning to about 8.30 at night. I'm finding

all this slightly bemusing he says today. Consider economics, advertising, marketing, consumerism, self-gratification, immediacy, personal responsibility, compensating for a stressful, money-poor, time-poor lifestyle. And why? Boots, co-op, superdrug, all crowded with sweets, crisps and chocolate, all cheap, poor quality, high margin. Why are you selling this rubbish at the counter? And they all are. And I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. One thing that I would just like to say about the food environment, because I understand it is a complex food environment that we're living in, but the kind of consequence of the way that we talk about food,

I think is sort of important. And we tend to vilify foods and call them junk foods and all of that kind of thing. But actually, there was a study that came out earlier this year important and we tend to vilify foods and call them junk foods and all of that kind of thing. But actually, there was a study that came out earlier this year that showed that people, regardless of whether they were eating foods predominantly prepared in the home or predominantly prepared out of the home, could achieve a healthy, very balanced diet that met dietary targets. So I don't think we can automatically assume that the food environment is always terrible. Certainly there are strategies that companies use to make it more difficult. to any sort of shop of that nature. Temptation for them is everywhere. This listener, I've been dieting since I was 14. I've been a classic yo-yo dieter.

I've tried everything. Hypnosis, Weight Watchers, Slimmer's World. I'm now 56 and more overweight than ever. My problem is that my weight does impact on my family in that I'm acutely aware of what, and this is awful, what a disappointment I am to them. I know my husband is ashamed of me. He's a naturally slim, naturally fit person, although he'd never say so. I feel my weight is a real problem for him.

And in a horribly weird way, knowing this makes me eat more. Oh, that's such a difficult, difficult situation. I would really encourage this particular person to have, first and foremost, some self-compassion because it sounds like they're really struggling. Secondly, I would encourage them to look at the concept of intuitive eating and health at every size, which I think might be really helpful for them. Yes, you're right about them showing a bit of love for themselves because that it does sound it's just extremely sad she goes on to say sometimes I'm so relieved I never had daughters because I think I might have been more likely to pass on my neurosis around food to them she actually has two sons Laura thank you very much for being with us appreciate it thank you thanks for having me and to everybody

who shared their experiences whether it's been via email or on the line, on the calls, we do appreciate it because some of this stuff is deeply personal. And it's great that so many of you are prepared to share it with us. Tomorrow, the programme is coming live from Dublin, from the Royal Irish Academy, no less. If you can't join us live, make sure you get the podcast. But you know about that because you've got this one. We'll speak to you tomorrow. Beyond Today is the daily podcast from radio 4 it asks one big question about one big story in the news and beyond i'm tina dehealy i'm matthew price and along with a team of curious

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