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Australian based fast food companies have agreed to a new guidelines relating to the marketing of children called “Australian quick service restaurant industry initiative for responsible advertising and marketing to children”. This has been signed by McDonalds, Hungry Jacks, Oporto, Red Rooster, Chicken Treat, KFC, and Pizza Hutt.

The big break though is that for the first time these companies will make sure that they have a nutritional information available upon request in their restaurants and also information on their websites and packaging where possible.

The impetus behind this is to ensure appropriate advertising to children which follows the communities back lash regarding the practices of advertising fast food to children.

The organisation which the main players in the fast food industry belongs to is called the Australia Association of National Advertises (AANA) who strongly supported this initiative.

To ensure that there is transparency and adherence to the code an independent third party will be assigned to ensure that they all are complying.

The Guidelines go further with the energy requirements, say 4-8 year olds 2080 kilojoules per meal and 9-10 year olds 2770 kilojoules per meal and also stipulate levels of saturated fat, sugar, and sodium. Whether these levels are satisfactory is open to debate.

Awash, the Australian Division of the World Action on Salt and health recommends an upper limit of 2.5gms for 4-8 year olds with a simple chart showing some lower salt options verses what may be a typical salt intake.

So hopefully with the new guidelines the fast food companies can adopt these new guidelines in changing there marketing to children strategies.

When need to learn to listen to our body, this means identifying the difference between being lazy, being unmotivated, emotionally fatigued and physically fatigued.

While some people may have mastered the being lazy situation, not doing anything due to excuses or justifications to yourself or others, we need to learn to identify when to stop and relax.
While this may seem pretty obvious, it’s a skill we need to re acquaint ourselves with. Try getting the work/life balance under control today.

If you fail to listen to your body, sooner or later your body will take it’s own initiative in the form of getting the flu from being run down, low immune responses to infection or disease, or being so fatigue that you are forced to “down tools” and do nothing, as you lack the energy to even get out of bed in severe cases.

We need to learn the ancient art of how to learn to listen to your body and relax.
I’m not talking about relaxing at every opportunity but striking a balance between work, rest and play.

If we continually push ourselves, we are constantly evoking the “Fight” response in our bodies, while we may not being chase by a sabre tooth tiger, we are in survival mode.
Deadlines and pressures at the office, rushing home to spend time with the kids, cleaning the house, taking the kids to sports and other activities, domestic chores, checking your emails, socialising with friends, go, go, go and on top of that your exercise program and training schedule with less than 8 hours of sleep.

So where is your “Me time”?
Our society is becoming chronically fatigued, tiredness, lack of energy, emotionally drained.

Why there is much debate about the chronic fatigue syndrome, we have to ask ourselves are we getting enough time in our busy schedules to relax and unwind.

Eventually, some of us will see the results of continually pushing ourselves. Ultimately our health should be number 1, not work or other commitments as one person once said “When your lying at the hospital, close to death, are you really thinking about all those great moments at the office working”

Try to make some changes in your life and change the patterns in your life, otherwise if you don’t relax and unwind your health will suffer.

Sleep deprivation, How it’s not only affecting our health but also affecting our lives according to the American Sleep Foundation

Today we get 90 mins on average less sleep than we did 100 years ago, and what the implications of being sleep deprived are for the average person.
New research is saying that sleep deprivation is not only growing the consumption of energy drinks and coffee but having an impact on the health systems which also leads to more road accidents and trauma, so this deficient in our usual sleep pattern of 8 hours eventually creates a debt that must be paid one way or another.

So while it may be hard, try to reduce your sleep deprivation today.

The Rudd Government is looking to change the labeling laws of fast food.

It’s a great idea to have food labeling for fast food but probably a simplified version that people can understand with a more detailed version underneath.

Similar to what City of Melbourne is introducing with the red, stop, go and amber light signalling keyed system to determine what is good to eat and what isn’t. The problem is today if people don’t have adequate knowledge of nutrition, what is acceptable levels of carbohydrate, protein and fat salt, then people may think that something alone fat is acceptable to eat without having an understanding of high carbohydrates or sugar levels, they also lead to increased energy intake if the sugars aren’t burnt. What needs to be is a standardisation of nutritional panelling so it’s a consistent measurement across all types of food groups and packaging sizes. Labeling of food is broken down to average serving size, servings per packet or per unit of food or product. It starts getting confusing to make a comparison based on other foods so having 100mls or 100grams is a good way of standardising what is adequate and what can be consistent across all nutritional panels.

So it will be interesting to see what happens with the labeling of fast food