What are they doing to our Food?

Our food manufacturers seem to be giving into government "suggestions" that they reduce the amount of fat, salt and sugar in our manufactured foods with the result that they are becoming quite tasteless.
First it was salt. Manufacturers were pressurised to reduce the amount of salt in food on the basis that it helps prevent heart problems. What they don't mention is that for older people like myself, lack of salt gives you joint pains which can make life quite uncomfortable. Is it better that I should eat some salt and still be able to walk a few miles, or give it up and be confine to the house by knee pains?

Then it was fat. Too many people in the country are obese, so we must all suffer. The net result seems to be that our ordinary loaves and biscuits have become crumbly. Hobnobs, which used to be one of my favourites, have become so crumbly that there's almost as much in crumbs left on the plate than I've eaten in the form of biscuit. Ginger Nuts have lost their crunch and aren't what they used to be. The latest company to announce a change is Nestle who are to reduce the fat in their Kit Kats, no doubt cutting costs at the same time.

Now today it is sugar, again presumably because of obesity, The government is to lower the minimum amount of sugar that must be used when making jam, and no doubt manufacturers will make full use of this reduction and substitute some cheaper alternative.  Fortunately, it seems that jam will be available from other sources; I alread buy marmalade from a lady who makes and sells it in aid of her church funds; it is far superior than any that I can get in the supermarket and is no more expensive. It doesn't come with a warning that it must be refrigerated after opening as it contains sufficient sugar to allow it to be kept in the sideboard, just as my mother did. Jams are also available from various other organisations raising funds, and already the demand tends to outstrip supply as people seek "the real thing" without added chemicals. Incidentally, when I last looked, a bag of muesli with "no added sugar" cost more at Tesco than one with added sugar!

Its time we were told to look after our own health and the government stopped interfering. If people want to get obese, that's their problem, and although it may cost the NHS money in the short term, they are unlikely to live long lives and will cost the state less in the longer term.

So, I'm going to follow in the footsteps of my parents and grandmother, eating what I fancy in moderation. My one regret is that I can't have decent dripping toast, as I had when I was a child, the modern beef has insufficient fat to produce any worthwhile dripping, although I've now been told that one can buy tubs of it at a local farm shop

My parents ate good food, with plenty of salt, fats and sugar, and both lived well into their nineties,  and my grandmother lived to 102. I'm hoping to follow in their footsteps, but some how I suspect that all the "E numbers" in my food are doing me more harm than the good old fasioned salt, fat and sugar.

Recommended Daily Allowances

I visited my GP a couple of weeks before Christmas, mainly in order to get a chitty for a routine blood test, which took all of half a minute. So we discussed a number of issues but mainly why I didn’t want the swine flu jab? I put forward my view of risk versus reward (risk of side effects v the reward of not dying from the flu) and he made no attempt to persuade me otherwise. As usual he took my blood pressure and declared it to be the same as previously, but he now thought that it would be best to take a diuretic to get it down a bit and perhaps I should try to reduce my salt intake. Why? Well apparently, they’ve reduced the recommended maximum desirable BP for some one of my age (which will no doubt in turn put up the cost of my holiday insurance).
This morning at breakfast, I was idly reading the back of the cereal box, the pot of marmalade and my wife’s container of artificial butter substitute. All had recommended daily allowances of this, that and the other printed on them. Unfortunately, the weights were all in Napoleonic measurements and my brain only works in Christian measurements at that time of the morning so they were totally meaningless. I then looked at the wrapper of the remains of a bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk from which it would appear that last night I had eaten virtually the whole of my day’s fat allowance in one go!
This got me round to thinking “Who decides these allowances”. Who, and on what basis do “They” decide that my blood pressure or BMI is too high ? Who decides that I should only eat so much fat or salt each day. Has the evidence been published for these conclusions? Can anybody tell me the likely additional risk if I don’t reduce my salt intake?
We all know that a few months ago a member of the committee which decided the recommended weekly alcohol intake "let the cat out of the bag" by revealing that there was no particular evidence for the chosen limits that they had recommended, just that “they seemed about right”. Are all these other figures determined in the same way?
In the US, bottles of wine bear a statement that “The Surgeon General recommends that .....”. Surely we should know the origin of all these health recommendations – do they come from the soon-to-resign Chief Medical Officer, because if so, I would feel justified in taking them with an even larger pinch of salt substitute!
Time now to go and have my RDA of Scotch, as recommended by an English Pensioner, and endorsed by Mrs E.P. who will expect something similar at the same time!