Air Diet Best For Diabetes, Says ACT

ACT New Zealand is delighted to be counted among the opposition parties calling for healthy eating policies following the release of a report showing New Zealand has one of the highest rates of diabetes among developed countries, says the party's Forbidden Foods Spokeswomanperson, Heather Roy.

An international team of researchers, working with the World Health Organisation, has found that New Zealand is among the top five nations where blood glucose levels indicate diabetes.

Labour leader Phil Goff says the findings vindicate Labour's call to remove GST from fresh fruit and vegetables.

The Greens' Spokesperson on the Prohibition of Everything, Sue Kedgley, says that doesn't go far enough. She wants a ban on the ingestion of any form of animal protein, and a law to make veganism compulsory.

"ACT supports all of the above," says Ms Roy, over a breakfast of tofu and spirulina. "But none of it addresses causes instead of symptoms. The real problem lies with eating, period. There's just too much eating going on. Studies have shown conclusively that the vast majority of participants who developed diabetes had been eating for years. Personally I put it down to all those free lunches that people had before Roger's reforms of the 80s … hatched - shame on him - over fish and chips.

"Yes, even I find it difficult to resist culinary temptation," Ms Roy sighs, lasciviously eyeing a side-dish of bean sprouts. "But we must bite the bullet (and very little else). Another recent study showed that diabetes can be reversed on a diet of 600 calories a day. While such a regime may fall short of the ideal, no-calorie diet, a law banning the consumption of more than 600 calories should be the minimum objective of all parties' healthy eating policies.

"Failure to pass such a law will only encourage stroppy individualists in their perverse and anti-social belief that what they eat is up to them," Ms Roy concludes.

ENDS

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Gordon Campbell: On Failures Of Care For Those With Mental Disabilities

Hard to imagine a more disturbing insight into the treatment of the vulnerable than the Health Ministry report on Te Roopu Taurima o Manukau. The Ministry has found that the country’s only kaupapa Maori intellectual disability residential care provider has been “seriously dysfunctional.”

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