Inherently healthy

So I'm in Hamilton for a wedding and home on Sunday (not a moment too soon, considering I have large amounts of geeky DVDs waiting for me - including this).

I'd like to write a bit more about the East Coast, but I'm tired and there's an easy target I have to hit first.

A couple of days ago NZ Herald had a big hoopla about how the new healthy foods standard would classify an apple as 'unhealthy' because it had too much sugar. This was followed by a hilarious letter to the editor by some atkins/zone supporter, explaining the dangers of sugar and how we should all restrict our apple intake because it'll make us gain weight (and of course if you gain weight you can't be healthy). But what I really wanted to draw attention to was this statement the next day:

Ms Buchtmann [a spokesperson for the food standards group] said it was never the agency's intention to penalise "inherently healthy products such as fruit and vegetables".

Wow it's nice to know that there are some products (not even foods, but 'products') that have inherent qualities of health.

My understanding that the purposes of this 'healthy foods' standard is that unless foods meet this standard they won't be able to advertise any form of health claims. Now I'm all about restricting companies ability to advertise bogus claims(Nutella's 'less fat than peanut butter, more sugar than jam' ad really cracked me up). But why not just ban advertisers from making any 'health' claims about their products, why does anyone think we would get good nutritional information from people trying to sell us stuff?

But then I'm always a little confused with the idea that the problem with nutrition is that people have a shortage of information (I think the problems are more likely poverty and that food is made to make money, rather than being made to be nutritious). It's not just government departments that think this; I've had men my age complain that no-one told them any nutritional information when they were growing up. It's not so much that I don't believe them, it's just that I find it hard to comprehend. I don't even care, and I can tell you a whole bunch of random nutrition information, because in our society food matters to women, and men don't have to care about it.