By Liza Belozerova, Poorer people in the UK tend to have unhealthier lifestyles - that's according to a report released today by the thinktank, the King's Fund. It also found that those with fewer qualifications tended to smoke and drink more and eat unhealthy foods. It has raised questions over who is responsible for the widening social gap in Britain's lifestyle habits, as Liza Belozerova reports Eating five pieces of fruit and vegetables a day is something many of us remember from the Labor government health campaign that also introduced a smoking ban in public places. Yet the report released today by The King’s Fund charity shows that the effect of that campaign have been mixed. The report covered the time between 2003 and 2008 when a Labor government embarked on a major campaign to promote healthy living and it looked at what it calls “multiple behaviors”: smoking, drinking, eating and physical activity. Although it shows that overall people are leading healthy lives, in England there’s a growing class divide in people’s eating habits. Unskilled and uneducated people tend to have unhealthier life styles, so what went wrong? David Buck, senior fellow researcher at The King’s Fund says that the campaign wasn’t well targeted:“From our perspective, there’s a question on “multiple behavior” rather than emphasizing eating habits on their own. That the campaign wasn’t as much focused, it had lots of campaigns on single behaviors, but wasn’t perhaps as bothered as it should have been about where the success was coming from. It wasn’t really targeting its campaigns and the work it was doing on particular groups in society. And it was also focused on single behavior – smoking strategy, eating strategy, etc. – but again it wasn’t really looking at how this clustered in society and taking actions on basis of that.” Source: Voice of Russia.
