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Tax burden may lead to obesity

Editor: The news this week seems to be emphasizing childhood obesity.

Editor:

The news this week seems to be emphasizing childhood obesity. One can certainly see this is a growing problem, a problem that if not checked could be a very costly one in a very short number of years.

Governments blame parents, which is hardly fair when it takes both parents working multiple jobs just to keep their heads above water, translating into spending less time with their children.

The less time parents have to spend with their children means a greater family dependency upon fast foods. Certainly the fast food advertisers have to be held accountable as well.

Today’s children don’t have to be brow beat into accepting fast-food fare; the reason for this is, of course, marketing. Try to offer a child food of our parents’ orientation such as cabbage, squash, turnips, parsnips, you name it and the kid will turn his/her nose up to such offering.

For myself I wonder about what is going into our food supply. Possibly giving growth hormones to our livestock may be filtering down through the food chain and this could well be a factor in childhood obesity. All of the food from milk, meat, grains as used in bread, is or has been genetically re-engineered, and is not exactly the food we purchased generations ago.

When I was a pre-teen I recall picking lovely delicious strawberries that grew on the Russian-owned farms of Surrey where the core could be easily removed. Now our strawberries are gigantic rubberoid products from mass-produced farms of who knows where, and the core, it’s just not removable.

Peaches and apples have also been genetically re-engineered. I have no idea what has been done to apples. All I know is that they are different and I can hardly find one I enjoy eating; peaches really irritate me because they, too, have been rubberized like strawberries.

It would probably be a good thing to have fast-food companies change their marketing procedures, but maybe we need to be asking our governments to undertake a thorough reevaluation of our food supply as well.

One of the greatest helps that we could offer families, to help them spend more time with their children, would be to reduce the ever-growing tax burden.

Doug Wilson

Williams Lake