promoting good health - AO3

There are five factors that effect health. These factors are:

Lifestyle choices
Social factors
Environmental factors
Financial factors
Physical factors

In this piece of writing I am going to explain to you both how lifestyle choices and social factors can affect health.

Lifestyle choices

You lifestyle choices can have a major impact on you health both positively and negatively. It is important to watch you diet and nutrition as eating the wrong foods can lead to serious illnesses that can be easily prevented. The food you eat can be the reason you look the way you look, you feel the way you feel and the reason why you act the way you act. Its hard to believe but what you eat determines how oily or dry your skin is, the colour of your teeth, the colour of your complexion, whether your hair is healthy looking and it determines whether you are obese or not. Your diet effects how your body systems work and can effect your day to day life for example if you have a bad diet you can have stomach pains, chest pains, feel tired and lethargic, become prone to sore heads and you end up being more likely to catch the common illnesses such as the flu. However this is not to say that you should never eat chips, chocolate, pizza and Chinese takeaway and I’m not saying that you should never eat burgers and English fries and that you will only escape serious illnesses if you just eat fruit and vegetables. What I’m trying to put across is the fact that by eating too many fatty foods you are putting you body under unnecessary pressure.

Gillian is a famous dietician that believes “you are what you eat.” Gillian has a television program, books, leaflets and posters on how the food you eat can effect the way you look, feel and perform in schools and work. The foods that she states are “bad” for you are: chips, Chinese takeaways, pizza, fried chicken, fries and kebab. The effects of these foods can be serious. Here are some facts that show how dangerous it can be eating too much fatty foods.

Foods high in fat, sugar and processed foods and low in nutrients can lead to infertility and increase the chances of miscarriage
A diet high in fat, sugar and salt leads to weight gain and increases the risk of obesity. Carrying excess weight doesn’t just increase the risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and infertility, it also is associated with fatigue, low self esteem and poor mental and physical performance
A diet that is low in the essential nutrients such as calcium can mean that you increase the risk of bones becoming weak or brittle. This is a ...

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Foods high in fat, sugar and processed foods and low in nutrients can lead to infertility and increase the chances of miscarriage
A diet high in fat, sugar and salt leads to weight gain and increases the risk of obesity. Carrying excess weight doesn’t just increase the risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and infertility, it also is associated with fatigue, low self esteem and poor mental and physical performance
A diet that is low in the essential nutrients such as calcium can mean that you increase the risk of bones becoming weak or brittle. This is a condition known as osteoporosis.
If a diet is poor it can effect you immune system and make you more likely to catch a cold or fl
If you have a balanced diet and get all the essential nutrients that the body needs your immune system will work properly to provide protection from infection and disease.
An unhealthy diet increases the risk of depression and mood swings. It is also linked to PMS, food cravings and anxiety.
One of the biggest killers associated with having a bad diet is cornary heart disease.

Coronary heart disease (CHD) is a preventable disease that kills more than 110,000 people in England every year. More than 1.4 million people suffer from angina and 275,000 people have a heart attack annually. CHD is the biggest killer in the country. The Government is committed to reducing the death rate from coronary heart disease and stroke and related diseases in people under 75 by at least 40%

The disease is the most common cause of , and is also the most common reason for death of men and women over 20 years of age. According to present trends in the United States, half of healthy 40-year-old males will develop CHD in the future, and one in three healthy 40-year-old women. According to the , is the country with the most occurrences of CHD.

The sympotoms of CHD

Chest pains
Irregular heart beats
Shortness of breath on excertion
Jaw pain, back pain or arm pain, esspecially on the left side, either during exertion or at rest.
Palpitations
Dizziness, light-headedness or fainting
Weakness on exertion or at rest.

A campaign that was set out to show people the effects that a bad diet could have was a campaign set up by Jamie Oliver. He targeted the school and children and tried to persuade them to eat healthier. Jamie put across that by having a better diet;

Your thinking power will be boosted
Your mood will be lifted
Reduced stress
Boost you vitality
Give you a healthier heart

Jamie Oliver helped people to realize that when it comes to heart disease, a healthy diet is the prime player:

Helps fight ageing and slows down your body’s natural deterioration
Helps chase away common colds and flu.
Prevents asthma and common headaches
Attacks bacteria and viruses
Makes your skin, hair and nails glow with health
Supply chemicals in the blood that can unclog arteries, reduce cholesterol, create blood clot solvents and send hormones to relax artery walls reducing blood pressure.

Jamie Oliver’s campaign

Jamie Oliver is a well known and respect chief that started a campaign to make people realise that Britain’s diet was getting worst instead of better. To grab peoples attention Jamie Oliver decided to start with school dinners and decided that something needed to be done. His aim was to “ban the junk in schools and get kids eating fresh, tasty nutritious food instead.” His campaign was massive and became a popular television program. Jamie Oliver campaigned through, posters, leaflet, interviews, and the media. His campaign changed the state of mind of people of all ages and it made the government realize that healthy eating starts in school. Through Jamie’s campaign the government has started new health promotion campaigns based on healthy eating. For example schools have to provide dinner ladies that are trained in cooking healthier foods; the schools have to order in food that is healthier and all vending machines supplying fizzy drinks such as Coca cola, chocolate bars and crisps. Instead the schools have to provide fruit, water, fruit juices and yogurts. Schools all over the U.K now have healthy eating promotions in the school whereby the pupils of the school have a chose of having free fruit when they spend £2.00. This encourages children to eat fruit as it is free so they might as well.

In my school, there is now a breakfast club in which those people who have no time for breakfast in the morning can call into the canteen to get something to eat to start their day of. The government has also encouraged the school to do so due to the fact that by having children eating breakfast in the morning they become less likely to put on weight and they also become more likely to do well in school.

Last March, the government pledged £280 million over three years for school meals. The estimated capital cost of refurbishing school kitchens so they can prepare food from scratch again is £290 million, but this only covers schools that already have a kitchen. The estimated cost of installing new kitchens in schools would be £350 million. Many kitchens are also badly in need of an upgrade and new equipment to enable them to handle fresh ingredients

This autumn, the government pledged further funds to subsidies ingredients for healthy meals, to set up a regional network of training kitchens for dinner ladies, to build kitchens in schools that currently have no facilities and to enable secondary school children to learn to cook at school.

Local and national government need to come up with a ten-year strategy and some real money to re-educate people about proper eating habits. This is what I think needs to happen now:

1. In schools: make cooking and life skills classes compulsory for all kids so they learn about food and good eating habits while they're young.

2. For teachers: recruit and train new cookery teachers, otherwise the new right that kids have to cookery lessons just isn’t going to happen.

3. For principles: empower heads to make every school a junk food free zone.

4. For parents: educate parents and help them to understand the basics of family cooking and responsible nutrition.

5. For dinner ladies: invest in dinner ladies with proper training and enough paid hours to cook their food with fresh ingredients.

6. Commit to a ten-year strategic plan and fund a long-term public campaign to get people back on to a proper diet and empower/persuade (and possibly scare, if needed) the public to make better choices. With obesity costing the NHS more than smoking, it seems logical that a similar campaign should be appropriate.

Jamie Oliver has an advantage when it came to launching his campaign as he had media backup. His campaign was on television and hit the new therefore everyone new about what was going on in their children’s school and therefore the government had no real chose but to do something about what food was supplied in the school, how fresh it was and where the food came from. By having the media behind him it made it easier for him to get the message of healthy eating across to the government and therefore pressure was put on the government to provide school children with the right foods. Below are some facts that Jamie found out while he was campaigning.

• One quarter of teenagers are already obese.
• 14% of boys and 17% of girls between the ages of two and 15 are overweight.
• Nearly one quarter of adults are already obese.
• Kids with fat parents are twice as likely to become obese.
• Kids who are obese by the age of 12 are 85% more likely to remain obese into adult life.
• Kids who are obese in their early teens are twice as likely to die by the age of 50.

Another campaign that was launched to try to combat the increasing rise in obesity was the television program called “Super Sized Me”. This was a program in which a man had to eat nothing but Mc Donald’s for a set period of time. Before the man started his trail he was weighed and his blood pressure and cholesterol levels where taken. The same was done after the trail. There was an extraordinary change in the man’s overall health.

The objectives of this program were to make people aware of the damage that can become of overeating and eating the wrong foods.

From this program Mc Donald’s have made changes to their menu. They are now providing salad, fruit and fruit drinks.