- Claire Baseley • Registered Nutritionist
16th January 2020
You can’t move on any high street for fast food outlets, be they chicken shops, burger restaurants or traditional chippies, selling cheap, high calorie meals that fill tummies with little nutritional quality. They proliferate in deprived areas, almost to the exclusion of shops that sell fresh produce and can form a large part of the diet in low income groups. They are part of our obesogenic environment. But it’s an individual’s responsibility to avoid going into a chicken shop isn’t it? Well aside from the fact that it might offer the most calories per pound for individuals in poverty, these establishments offer far more than just food. They offer a space for young people. – A news report on […]
16th June 2017
Hotel buffet, how we love thee. Jelly for breakfast, 24/7 burgers and the all-you-can eat dessert buffet… Sound like culinary heaven or a recipe for disaster? I’ve recently returned from my honeymoon in Mexico where we stayed in a beautiful, all-inclusive hotel in which there was a limitless supply of food and drink, 24 hours a day. The food was pretty good quality; a lot of it excellent and every palate, however fussy, was catered for. There were a la carte restaurants serving Thai, Italian, Japanese or Mexican specialities as well as the ubiquitous buffet restaurant, in which every night you could dine on any cuisine under the sun. Now I’m not here to tell you about my honeymoon […]
2nd March 2017
As a nutritionist, I am often asked “What causes obesity?” The answer is initially simple yet becomes fiendishly complex. Most scientists will tell you that we gain weight because we eat more calories than we need. However, WHY we overeat or in some way fail to eat a healthy balanced diet is far more complicated. When I explain this, I am often met with derision from seemingly intelligent individuals who consider that anyone eating a less than perfect diet is unintelligent, feckless, wilfully negligent and that they are therefore beyond help. Why should the state intervene to make everyone’s life miserable for the sake those individuals who can’t control themselves? Here’s why what and how much we eat is not […]
5th November 2016
I attended the Childhood Obesity Summit at which the great and the good of the nutrition, medical and behavioural science worlds collided to share their views on what is a global problem. Obesity is inextricably linked to GDP yet is also associated with societal deprivation. The UK is ‘the fat man of Europe’ spending more on treating obesity and type 2 diabetes than collectively on policing, the fire service and judiciary, to quote Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer. With the latest Childhood Obesity Plan from the Government seen as a missed opportunity, particularly in early years settings, what should we be doing to combat obesity? First things first, if I had a pound for every time I […]