| OK Rosie, shall we try to get some ideas together for our presentation on diet and obesity? |
| Sure. |
| I can talk about the experiment I did to see if people can tell the difference between real sugar and artificial sweeteners. |
| Where you gave people drinks with either sugar or artificial sweeteners |
| and they had to say which they thought it was? |
| Yeah. It took me ages to decide exactly how I'd organise it, |
| especially how I could make sure that people didn't know which drink I was giving them. |
| It was hard to keep track of it all, |
| especially as I had so many people doing it - |
| I had to make sure I kept a proper record of what each person had had. |
| So could most people tell the difference? |
| Yeah - I hadn't thought that they would be able to, but most people could. |
| Then there's that experiment I did measuring the fat content of nuts, |
| to see if the nutritional information given on the packet was accurate. |
| The one where you ground up the nuts and mixed them with a chemical to absorb the fat? |
| Yes. |
| My results were a bit problematic - |
| the fat content for that type of nut seemed much lower than it said on the package. |
| But I reckon the package information was right. |
| I think I should probably have ground up the nuts more than I did. |
| It's possible that the scales for weighing the fat weren't accurate enough, too. |
| I'd really like to try the experiment again some time. |
| So what can we say about helping people to lose weight? |
| There's a lot we could say about what restaurants could do to reduce obesity. |
| I read that the items at the start of a menu and the items at the end of a menu |
| are much more likely to be chosen than the items in the middle. |
| So, if you put the low-calorie items at the beginning and end of the menu, |
| people will probably go for the food with fewer calories, without even realising what they're doing. |
| I think food manufacturers could do more to encourage healthy eating. |
| How? |
| Well, when manufacturers put calorie counts of a food on the label, |
| they're sometimes really confusing and I suspect they do it on purpose. |
| Because food that's high in calories tastes better, and so they'll sell more. |
| Yeah, so if you look at the amount of calories in a pizza, |
| they'll give you the calories per quarter pizza and you think, oh that's not too bad. |
| But who's going to eat a quarter pizza? |
| Exactly. |
| I suppose another approach to this problem is to get people to exercise more. |
| Right. |
| In England, the current guidelines are for at least 30 minutes of brisk walking, five days a week. |
| Now when you ask them, about 40% of men |
| and 30% of women say they do this, |
| but when you objectively measure the amount of walking they do with motion sensors, |
| you find that only 6% of men and 4% of women do the recommended amount of exercise. |
| So you can see why obesity is growing. |
| So how can people be encouraged to take more exercise? |
| Well, for example, think of the location of stairs in a train station. |
| if people reach the stairs before they reach the escalator when they're leaving the station, |
| they're more likely to take the stairs. |
| And if you increase the width of the stairs, |
| you'll get more people using them at the same time. |
| It's an unconscious process and influenced by minor modifications in their environment. |
| Right. |
| And it might not be a big change, |
| but if it happens every day, it all adds up. |
| Yes. |
| But actually, I'm not sure if we should be talking about exercise in our presentation. |
| Well, we've done quite a bit of reading about it. |
| I know, but it's going to mean we have a very wide focus, |
| and our tutor did say that we need to focus on causes and solutions in terms of nutrition. |
| Oh, I suppose so. |
| And we've got plenty of information about that. |
| OK, well that will be simpler. |
| So what shall we do now? |
| We've still got half an hour before our next lecture. |
| Let's think about what we're going to include and what will go where. |
| Then we can decide what slides we need. |
| OK, fine. |