UNIT 12 FOOD

Level: B.1.2

ss: 25

age: from 16 onwards

1st session
Warm-up
s-s Give them some pictures related to food. They have to explain it to
their partner
Presentation

1. Nearly two-thirds of the UK population is either overweight or

obese
Fat, not thin, is today's norm. But studies show that we don't notice
because it has happened gradually and we have got used to seeing
people who are overweight. Kids in pictures taken on the beach in the
1950s, with ribs showing, look famished to modern eyes. They are of
normal weight. A quarter of us are actually obese, defined as a body
mass index (weight in kg divided by the square of your height in metres)
of 30 or above. BMI is not a brilliant tool for every individual biceps
packed with muscle weigh as much as flab but it is satisfactory at a
population level.
Men are fatter than women (67% of men and 57% of women are
overweight or obese in the UK, according to the Global Burden of
Disease study from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation in
Seattle). Socio-economically deprived areas tend to have higher rates of
people who are overweight, but no income group is immune. There is a
community effect: you are more likely to be overweight if your friends
and neighbours are and you see it as the norm.

2. Obesity is shortening our lives

Moderate obesity (BMI 30-35) cuts life expectancy by two to four years
and severe obesity (BMI 40-45) by an entire decade, according to a
major study in the Lancet in 2009. This is most likely to affect today's
children; more than a fifth of five-year-olds and a third of 11-year-olds
are overweight or obese. "Obesity is such that this generation of children
could be the first in the history of the United States to live less healthful
and shorter lives than their parents," said Dr David S Ludwig, director of
the obesity programme at the Children's Hospital Boston and one of the
authors of a paper that, in 2005, came to similar conclusions in the New
England Journal of Medicine . The proportion of overweight children in
the US and the UK is similar.

3. Obesity could bankrupt the NHS

The NHS spends 5bn a year on diseases such as strokes and diabetes
that are linked to obesity. Within a few decades, that is predicted to climb
to 15bn. Type 2 diabetes is a huge problem: 10% of the NHS budget
already goes on that alone. Being overweight is the chief cause and the
numbers are soaring, from 1.4 million in 1996 to more than three million
today, with a predicted rise to five million by 2025.
A study this month revealed that one-third of the population is on the
verge of type 2 diabetes, having high blood glucose levels classified as
prediabetes. "If this increase in prediabetes and diabetes isn't tackled
now, it will destroy the health service," said Barbara Young, chief
executive of Diabetes UK. "Many of the problems the secretary of state
is trying to tackle, such as too many people coming in as emergencies to
hospitals, are about the one in six people in any hospital at any time
who've got diabetes. So it's a massive impact on the NHS and it's going
to get even bigger."
Type 2 diabetes is costly in every sense apart from complications such
as blindness and amputation, it makes you five times more likely to have
a heart attack or stroke.

4. It's an unfair fight

The government spends 14m a year on its anti-obesity social marketing
programme Change4Life. The food industry spends more than 1bn a
year on marketing in the UK. Guess who has the subtler operation?

Big Food is watching you. Technology has allowed its scientists to track
shoppers' eye movements, logging precisely which supermarket shelves
we glance at and which keep our attention. It's not just the in-your-face
bright packaging with happy slogans, but which aisle the product is in.
Food companies pay a premium to have their merchandise on enddisplays, which account for 30% of supermarket sales. We are not as in
control of our shopping as we like to believe. We go in with good
intentions we come out with large bottles of fizzy drinks and packets of
biscuits.

5. Obesity took off in the have-it-all 80s

But it was unregistered by the government in power. McDonald's moved
its headquarters into Margaret Thatcher's Finchley constituency in 1982,
three years after she became prime minister. She opened the building in
1983 and visited again in 1989, on the 10th anniversary of her prime
ministership, when she congratulated the company on the jobs it had

created and its economic success.

6. Snacking is "a newly created behaviour"

It was virtually unknown before the second world war, according to Barry
Popkin, professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill School of Public Health. It is now a big cause of obesity and

considered a major growth sector for the food and drink industry. Popkin
published a study showing US children were eating almost continuously,
with three snacks a day as well as their ordinary meals. "Our children
are moving towards constant eating," he said.

7. The food industry is behaving as the tobacco industry did

Critics say it pays experts, funds scientific papers that support its case,
rubbishes the evidence that goes against it and declares, as part of its
participation in the government's Responsibility Deal, that it is making its
products more healthy.
Big Food and the politicians who support the industry say there is no
such thing as bad food. There is an element of truth in that. One Mars
bar (once marketed as a healthy, energy-giving snack with the slogan: "A

Mars a day helps you work, rest and play") won't in itself do you any
harm. Daily sweet snacks, washed down with sugary drinks and
supplemented with crisps, prior to a cheeseburger with chips, are highly
likely to contribute to heart disease, however.
Large numbers of scientists advise the food industry and take funding for
research because they are focused on the micro, not the macro picture.
The "sustaining members" of the British Nutrition Foundation include
Coca- Cola, Kellogg's, Mondelez (owner of Cadbury), Nestl, PepsiCo,
Tate & Lyle, Associated British Foods and Unilever. The chair of the
government's nutritional advisory committee investigating carbohydrates,
including sugar, is Professor Ian Macdonald from Nottingham University,
who has been an adviser to Coca-Cola and Mars.

8. Your brain, not your stomach, tells you when to stop eating
Hunger is in the mind. Dr Suzanne Higgs at Birmingham University
carried out a remarkable experiment to prove it. Her team gave a group
of amnesiacs a lunch of sandwiches and cakes. When everybody had
finished eating, they cleared away and brought in a fresh lunch 10
minutes later. A control group of people with no memory problems
groaned and refused any more food. The amnesiac group tucked in and
ate the same again.

When we eat in front of the television or while looking at our computer

screen at work, we are not giving lunch or dinner our full attention. Our
brain is not registering how much we have eaten and we may well feel
we haven't had enough. Higgs is working on a phone app so that people
can take pictures of their meals and snacks as a reminder that they've
actually had enough.

9. By the age of five, it is almost too late to intervene

The EarlyBird diabetes study of 300 children in Devon showed that they
had already gained 7090% of their excess weight before primary
school. It is far harder to get rid of weight than to put it on, even as a
child. Some experts think that if we want to prevent obesity, we're going
to have to find ways to help parents from, or even before, the birth of
their baby.
We think obesity is about adults eating fried chicken and chips. But most
babies in the UK are overfed 75% of those aged four to 18 months in
the government-commissioned Diet and Nutrition Survey of Infants and
Young Children, published in 2013, were getting more calories than they
needed from formula milk and solid foods. Breastfed babies, who can

look skinny compared with their bottle-fed friends, are in fact usually the
right weight. Big, bouncing babies, contrary to the old wisdom, are not
healthier babies. Slow growth is best. Low birthweight babies, in
particular, should not be overfed in a bid to help them catch up.

10. Obese children are increasingly being taken into care

Those who think children are getting fat because they sit in front of the
television too much may also be wrong. Another finding from EarlyBird
was that inactivity does not lead to obesity obesity leads to inactivity.
Overweight children feel less like running about. Shockingly, out of 300
children monitored from the age of five for 12 years, three had
developed diabetes by the end and 55 had high blood glucose levels
that suggested they were on the verge of it too.
At least 74 in the past five years, according to a Freedom of Information
request from the Daily Mirror, which got usable responses from only 128
out of 206 local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales, suggesting
that the numbers are even higher. Their request followed the revelation
that a five-year-old girl weighing 10st 5lb had been taken away from her
family in Newport, south Wales, in August 2012. Earlier this month it was
revealed that parents in King's Lynn, Norfolk, had been arrested on
suspicion of neglect and child cruelty because their 11-year-old son
weighed 15 stone.
Doctors and social workers have a dilemma, however. Obese children
may have caring (possibly also obese) parents who may not succeed in

getting their child's (or their own) weight down. "As obesity remains
extremely difficult for professionals to treat, it is untenable to criticise
parents for failing to treat it successfully if they engage adequately with
treatment," said Dr Russell Viner of the Institute of Child Health, who
along with colleagues proposed a framework for action in the British
Medical Journal in 2010.

ARE YOU A MINDLESS EATER?

If you can tick three or more of the following, and you want to lose
weight, mindfulness can help

Do you eat while watching television or just because food 'is there'?
Do you ever
Eat until you feel uncomfortably full?
Eat very quickly, consuming a meal in less than ten minutes?

Eat while standing up or walking?

Eat while driving?
Eat when not hungry?
Eat just because food is there?
Eat while watching television?
Eat in front of the computer?
Wait until extremely hungry to eat?
Eat in response to stress or anxiety?
Eat in response to depression, loneliness, or sadness?
Eat in response to anger or frustration?
Eat in response to boredom?
Eat convenience and fast food because you havent planned ahead?
Eat just because others are eating?
Eat because the clock says its time to eat?
Only know that youre finished when the plate or package is empty?
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3026691/Stay-slimmindfulness-diet-s-proven-way-train-brain-resist-cravings-unhealthyfood-blissfully-easy-follow.html#ixzz3WkQu0bFm
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Correct the mistakes by pairs, take notes and after 10-15 each pair is
going to correct the mistakes.
Practice.
Vocabulary activity

Adjectives + prepositions
Flashcards: adjectives and prefixes. Compound as many adjectives as
you can in 5 minutes. After working in groups of 5 students, every group
is going to say what words theyve got
Pag 28-29 New English file granate
Pag 16-19 workbook objective proficiency
Pag 13- 19 adjectives- suffixes and prefixes grammar longman
Advanced new English file A recipe for disaster

Fat to fit: how Finland did it

Thirty years ago, Finland was one of the world's unhealthiest nations. Diet was poor, people
were inactive and heart disease was at record levels. Now it's one of the fittest countries on
earth. Ian Sample discovers the secrets of their success

Finland is anything but typical of the world. According to sports and health experts, it is one
of only two countries to have halted the downward spiral towards terminal couch potatoism,
or sedentary inactivity to use the official parlance. Only Canada, though New Zealand may be
a contender, can claim to have done as much to get people off their sofas and exercising.
Finland's success story is all the more impressive for where it has pulled itself up from. "In
the 1970s, we held the world record for heart disease, "says Pekka Puska, director of the
National Institute of Public Health in Helsinki. The dubious honour was the inevitable
consequence of a Finnish culture that embraced just about every risk factor for heart disease
there is. "The idea then was that a good life was a sedentary life. Everybody was smoking and
eating a lot of fat. Finnish men used to say vegetables were for rabbits, not real men, so
people simply did not eat vegetables. The staples were butter on bread, full-fat milk and fatty
meat, "he says.
Present-day Finland is a very different place. Topping the league of death shocked the
government into a full-blown campaign to dramatically improve peoples' health. And it seems
to have worked. The number of men dying from cardiovascular heart disease has dropped by
at least 65%, with deaths from lung cancer being slashed by a similar margin. Physical
activity has risen and now, Finnish men can expect to live seven years longer and women six
years longer than before measures were brought in. Having come so far, Finland now finds

itself in the spotlight from health officials across the world who are desperate to find out what
it was the Finns got so right.
"The biggest innovation was massive community-based intervention. We tried to change
entire communities, "says Puska. Instead of a mass campaign telling people what not to do,
officials blitzed the population with positive incentives. Villages held "quit and
win"competitions for smokers, where those who didn't spark up for a month won prizes.
Entire towns were set against each other in cholesterol-cutting showdowns. "We would go in,
measure everyone's cholesterol, then go back two months later, "says Puska. The towns that
cut cholesterol the most would win a collective prize. "We didn't tell people how to cut
cholesterol, they knew that. It wasn't education they needed, it was motivation. They needed
to do it for themselves. "
Local competitions were combined with sweeping nationwide changes in legislation. All
forms of tobacco advertising were banned outright. Farmers were all but forced to produce
low-fat milk.
In time, the Finnish authorities succeeded in forcing down salt intake, a crucial move for
cutting blood pressure, and blood cholesterol has fallen along with fat intake and smoking.
Observers of the Finnish success story are now working on how they can bring such drastic
improvements to their own countries. Privately, some claim that Finland had it easier than
many because its citizens are happy to live in a nanny state. Vuori believes nanny state is too
strong a term, but concedes that Finland had advantages other countries might not. "There
may be a greater proportion of people in Britain who believe it is not for the state to say what
we can drink and eat, or whether we can smoke. In Finland, regardless of your political
views, we are quite obedient, we are trustful of the state and the media.
But people are also well-educated, they hear the messages we put out and they know they are
sensible, "says Vuori.

Listening Michael Sandel, the public philosopher

Michael Sandel is a political philosopher with the global profile of a rock star. He's
a Harvard professor who doesn't just lecture in halls - but in stadiums.
Script Should we bribe people to be healthy?
Hello and welcome to the LSE, my name is Michael Sandel and its a pleasure to
welcome you to the third in our series of debates. The debates involves public
controversies and its an experiment in civic discourse and civic argument. My
hunch, and thats what were going to try out is this: that our public discourse
would go better if when we debate, and when we disagree, we articulated more
fully the principles, the reasons, the big ideas of philosophy that lie just beneath
the surface of the arguments we have. It seems to me that public philosophy is a
matter of thinking and reasoning together even about hard and fraught and
contested moral questions that arise in public life. Today we take up a question
that has generated a lot of controversy. It has to do with the use of financial
incentives, the question of whether we should pay people to change unhealthy

habits. Its estimated that half of UK health spending goes on treating the
consequences of unhealthy behaviour: excessive eating, smoking, drinking and
lack of exercise, but only half of one per cent of NHS spending goes on promoting
healthy behaviour. Until the logic of paying people to undertake healthy
behaviour is that spending small amounts of money, now, could encourage
people to live healthier lives and also to save the NHS much bigger sums in the
future. Thats the argument in favour, but not everyone agrees. Some people say
that bribing people to look after their own health is patronising to them, and
unfair to those who dont take up unhealthy behaviour in the first place. So our
question this week is should we bribe people to be healthy? Lets begin by seeing
what our audience here at the LSE thinks about this question, and lets take a
particular example of a health bribe: paying people to lose weight. In Kent there
was a trial sponsored by the NHS to pay people, people whore overweight, to
lose pounds and to lose weight. It was possible to earn, if you really needed to
lose a lot of weight and succeeded in doing so, possible to earn up to 425, if
you could do it. Now, lets see what the audience here thinks about the idea of
paying people to lose weight. How many people are in favour of a scheme like
that? Raise your hand. And how many are against?
For the listeners at home I will tell you that the results of our voter informal vote
by raising up hands, the majority here in the LSE are against. Lets begin our
discussion by hearing first from someone whos against the scheme? Whats
wrong with it?
My name is
I dont believe we should bribe people to be healthy, I think
we all have a personal responsibility to be healthy, I think if you are of sound
mind and body and youre an adult I believe that you are responsible for what
you put into your body and how you live your lifestyle, I think its absolutely
ludicrous to bribe people to be healthy.
Ludicrous to bribe people to be healthy! Who else?
I disagree with the view, I think you can pay people to be healthy, if we take one
example: cigarettes smoking, the government taking a lot of taxation from
smokers, so on the one hand they take money in, what contra proportion of that
money be given back to smokers as a way of stopping smoking, we want
ultimately the lowest cost and it may will be cheaper to pay someone to stop
smoking than allow them to get a serious disease potentially cancer where the
costs of treating that cancer is substantially more than giving a few hundred quid
to say if you stop smoking will give you three hundred pound would be a lot more
less than spending thousands upon thousands, so I think you can pay people to
be healthy.

Questions about the listening exercise:

Session
Whats an addiction? Elicit answers from my ss, try to find a proper definition
Then, explain the situation in different countries.
Next step is ss have to think about possible solutions to the addiction of obesity. They have to
think about measures to tackle it. Theyll work in groups of five. After 5 minutes, each group
has to explain their ideas.
Session
Show and taste
Session
Computer room. Try to find a recipe on the internet with your partner.

This didactic unit is thought for a group of 25-30

students, the level is B12 according to the European
Marc of reference. The age of the students is 16 years
old onwards, as in the EOI its not possible to be
registered before. Theyve got a strong motivation to
learn English. There are 5 sessions of 100 each and the
topic were going to deal with is related to food.