1OK Rosie, shall we try to get some ideas together for our presentation on diet and obesity?
2Sure.
3I can talk about the experiment I did to see if people can tell the difference between real sugar and artificial sweeteners.
4Where you gave people drinks with either sugar or artificial sweeteners
5and they had to say which they thought it was?
6Yeah. It took me ages to decide exactly how I'd organise it,
7especially how I could make sure that people didn't know which drink I was giving them.
8It was hard to keep track of it all,
9especially as I had so many people doing it -
10I had to make sure I kept a proper record of what each person had had.
11So could most people tell the difference?
12Yeah - I hadn't thought that they would be able to, but most people could.
13Then there's that experiment I did measuring the fat content of nuts,
14to see if the nutritional information given on the packet was accurate.
15The one where you ground up the nuts and mixed them with a chemical to absorb the fat?
16Yes.
17My results were a bit problematic -
18the fat content for that type of nut seemed much lower than it said on the package.
19But I reckon the package information was right.
20I think I should probably have ground up the nuts more than I did.
21It's possible that the scales for weighing the fat weren't accurate enough, too.
22I'd really like to try the experiment again some time.
23So what can we say about helping people to lose weight?
24There's a lot we could say about what restaurants could do to reduce obesity.
25I read that the items at the start of a menu and the items at the end of a menu
26are much more likely to be chosen than the items in the middle.
27So, if you put the low-calorie items at the beginning and end of the menu,
28people will probably go for the food with fewer calories, without even realising what they're doing.
29I think food manufacturers could do more to encourage healthy eating.
30How?
31Well, when manufacturers put calorie counts of a food on the label,
32they're sometimes really confusing and I suspect they do it on purpose.
33Because food that's high in calories tastes better, and so they'll sell more.
34Yeah, so if you look at the amount of calories in a pizza,
35they'll give you the calories per quarter pizza and you think, oh that's not too bad.
36But who's going to eat a quarter pizza?
37Exactly.
38I suppose another approach to this problem is to get people to exercise more.
39Right.
40In England, the current guidelines are for at least 30 minutes of brisk walking, five days a week.
41Now when you ask them, about 40% of men
42and 30% of women say they do this,
43but when you objectively measure the amount of walking they do with motion sensors,
44you find that only 6% of men and 4% of women do the recommended amount of exercise.
45So you can see why obesity is growing.
46So how can people be encouraged to take more exercise?
47Well, for example, think of the location of stairs in a train station.
48if people reach the stairs before they reach the escalator when they're leaving the station,
49they're more likely to take the stairs.
50And if you increase the width of the stairs,
51you'll get more people using them at the same time.
52It's an unconscious process and influenced by minor modifications in their environment.
53Right.
54And it might not be a big change,
55but if it happens every day, it all adds up.
56Yes.
57But actually, I'm not sure if we should be talking about exercise in our presentation.
58Well, we've done quite a bit of reading about it.
59I know, but it's going to mean we have a very wide focus,
60and our tutor did say that we need to focus on causes and solutions in terms of nutrition.
61Oh, I suppose so.
62And we've got plenty of information about that.
63OK, well that will be simpler.
64So what shall we do now?
65We've still got half an hour before our next lecture.
66Let's think about what we're going to include and what will go where.
67Then we can decide what slides we need.
68OK, fine.