Downing Street Says » Egypt Bombings

Asked about the launch of a Government campaign to consumers to encourage healthier lifestyles, the PMOS said that it was a fact that in terms of the impact of health advice, those messages a teenager might receive in a shop were likely to have as much or perhaps even a bigger impact than messages elsewhere. Therefore it was important that we worked with the retail industry to deliver healthy messages. Supermarkets and other outlets were already responding in terms of messaging for a healthy lifestyle, not just in terms of what they sold but in the messages that were on the products they sold.

Asked if the Government was considering introducing stricter measures to make people look after themselves, the PMOS said that first and foremost it was important that people understood why it was important to lead a healthy lifestyle. That was what today was about. If you led a healthy lifestyle you could potentially add 11 years to your life. Therefore people had to understand the issues and be given the information with which to make informed choices about what they ate, how they exercised and so on. In the end you couldn’t force people to lead a healthy lifestyle.

Put to him that we had forced people to stop smoking, the PMOS said no. We had protected other people from the harmful affects of something that individuals did, but we weren’t stopping people smoking. In the same way we could provide information to people about healthy lifestyles but it was up to people to decide whether they abided by it or not. What we shouldn’t ignore was the positive impact that that would have on the health service. It was very much part of the reform agenda of the NHS to move the emphasis from being purely reactive to proactive. Put to him that there would be long term costs to the NHS if everyone lived 11 years longer, the PMOS said that it depended how healthy people were for those 11 years.

Asked again if there was room for more draconian measures if this campaign didn’t work, the PMOS said that the premise of that question appeared to be that we had we banned smoking and might therefore ban other things which were unhealthy, but that simply wasn’t the case, we had not banned smoking per se. Asked if we might put restrictions on advertising for instance, the PMOS said that we had already seen moves to produce guidelines concerning advertising towards children as well as other measures. What you couldn’t do though was take away choice from people. You could inform that choice however and that was the important thing.

Asked if the Prime Minister was prepared to lead by example and publish the results of his medical examination, the PMOS said that there was a non sequitur there, in that the Prime Minister was prepared to lead by example by saying what he was doing to try and lead a healthier lifestyle. Asked what the Prime Minister was doing, the PMOS said that the Prime Minister accepted that if you drunk a cup of coffee you should have a glass of water with it, he was walking more upstairs rather than taking lifts, and abiding by the increased emphasis on eating fruit and vegetables. Those were, as we said, small steps which made big differences. Asked if he was still using the rowing machine, the PMOS said yes.

Asked by the Evening Standard how many of those extra 11 years the Government wanted people to work, the PMOS said that he understood the concerns of those working for the Evening Standard. The thought of getting up at 4am for 11 more years would certainly gave pause for thought, but perhaps that was a matter to be discussed between the journalist and his employer.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Post a public comment

Name (required)
E-mail (required)
(You must give an email address, but it will not be displayed to the public.)
Website
(You may give your website, and it will be displayed to the public.)

Comments:

This is not a way of contacting the Prime Minister. If you would like to contact the Prime Minister, go to the 10 Downing Street official site.

Privacy note: Shortly after posting, your name and comment will be displayed on the site. This means that people searching for your name on the Internet will be able to find and read your comment.

Original PMOS briefings are © Crown Copyright. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland. Click-use licence number C02W0004089. Material is reproduced from the original 10 Downing Street source, but may not be the most up-to-date version of the briefings, which might be revised at the original source. Users should check with the original source in case of revisions. Comments are © Copyright contributors. Everything else is © Copyright Downing Street Says.

» Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Egypt Bombings

No Comments »

Post a public comment

Search

Supported by

Recent Briefings

Archives

Links

Syndicate (RSS/XML)

Credits

Enquiries