Eating Responsibly

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With the aim of changing the unhealthy eating habits of some families and children, Australian government has involved in many sensible plans and ideas. Recently, the Federal Government’s preventive taskforce report has discussed of taxes to influence healthy food. According to Coalition senior adviser Jane Martin: “The best mix would be to increase the price of unhealthy foods and to subsidise fresh foods” (Miletic 2009, pg.3). In response to this social issue, a majority of people interviewed also agreed with the idea of regulating the use of popular movie and cartoon characters in promoting unhealthy foods (91 %) and marketting fast food by using competitions (90%), based on a study from the Obesity Policy Coalition conducted by Cancer council Victorian (Miletic, 2009, pg 4). Furthermore, with the invention of a new system named “the food traffic light”, consumers,especially parents and children, can be conscious of the energy intakes in their choices of food. The products will be labelled as red, amber, or green according to level of sugar, salturated fat and salt.( Stark 2009, pg 5). Aside from the society, schools play an important role in structuring the healthy eating habits for children. “Some schools have adopted healthy food policies that limit or eliminate foods high in sugar, salt, and fat and provide healthy food and drinks.” (Leon 2003). For these schools, he sets Melbourne Collingwood College as an example. With the establisment of a kitchen garden and the assistance of chef Stefanie Alexander, the weekly schedule for students are an hour gardening and an hour and a half cooking. Indeed, this idea received positive feedbacks which is a hope for a change in the schemes of anti-unhealthy food. However, the problem will not be totally solved as long as some parents do not seriously keep an eye on what their children are eating. “The trend of parents shifting responsibility to childcare centres, schools and government” is clearly an alert .In this case, no matter how much money the Government spend on banning fast food advertisements, “the weak-willed parents” can not stop their children from getting the hazard of obesity (Panahi 2009, pg. 23). Therefore, parent’s responsibility for their children is undoubtedly the most important requirement for a healthy diet as Panahi advised: “If you don’t buy it for them, they can’t eat it” ( 2009, pg 23). Last but not least, Kate Carnell-head of the Australian Food and Grocery Council put a conclusion for all the solutions: People are not forced to prevent them from eating those junk foods as long as they have the responsibility for a balanced diet and more important, people need to exercise(Stark 2009, pg.

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