Should supermarkets promote healthy eating? British Supermarkets are under constant pressure to uphold their consumer's expectations

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Should supermarkets promote healthy eating?

        

British Supermarkets are under constant pressure to uphold their consumer’s expectations, and at the moment healthy eating is a big issue.  Consumers are changing their tastes towards the “healthier” options.  This demand is putting pressure on the supermarkets to change their products and to compete against each other to make their product range healthier.  

        Today the population in Britain is becoming more and more overweight and the number of clinically obese people in Britain has doubled in the past decade.  47 percent of men and 33 percent of women are overweight, and nearly a quarter of both sexes are obese.  Weight problems seem to be starting at an increasingly young age.  In a recent study of Leeds school children, 20% of nine year olds and a third of 11 year old girls were overweight. One in ten of the primary school children in the study were obese.  This is mainly due to the emphasis of unhealthy and fattening foods, such as cakes, crisps and chocolate.  Obesity can have a very bad impact on your health.  It takes an average, nine years off an individual's life expectancy, and is an increased health risk.  The major health problems caused by obesity are diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, respiratory disease, cancer, osteoarthritis and psychological problems.  It results in 30,000 deaths a year.  Obesity also causes high economic costs to the country.  In England, the estimated annual financial cost of obesity is £0.5 billion in treatment costs to the National Health Service.  Another problem caused by obesity in Britain is the loss of days work due to it, it is estimated that 18 million sick days are taken in a year.    

        Unbalanced diets containing “unhealthy” foods can also lead to many other health problems.  One of these is high cholesterol.  Foods from animals such as egg yolks and whole milk dairy products contain it.  The body makes all the cholesterol it needs, so people don't need to consume it. Saturated fatty acids are the main culprit in raising blood cholesterol, which increases your risk of heart disease.  The government needs to ensure that people are made aware of the foods with high cholesterol and they need to be encouraged to by healthy food.  Cholesterol problems can cause the national health services to loose a lot of valuable time, which could have been avoided.  High cholesterol results in many heart attacks and these people need to be hospitalised.

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        Another problem is that foods seem to be containing very high amounts of salt.  In most cases the labelling is very small and it is hard to recognise the salt content.  However, this is very important because too much salt can lead to high blood pressure.  High blood pressure is the main cause of strokes and a major cause of heart attacks, which are two of the most common causes of death and illness in the UK.  To prevent adverse health effects consensus action is being taken on salt and people are being made aware of salt content by introducing ...

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