Biscuits? What's wrong with biscuits, like, ever? A glass of cold milk with milk choccy digestives from out the fridge, or malted milks as an alternative, you could live on that

Tea is what you have with a biscuit, you subversive.
Mid-morning or mid-afternoon.

I wouldn't be surprised if you subscribe to that other American perversion, Oreos, as well.

Nothing at all, I (over)indulge in them myself, but they are not and should never be breakfast.

Surprised no-one has mentioned Nestlé's latest marketing gimmick, hot on the heels of the recent breakfast cereal sugar publicity:

[url=http://www.battleofthebreakfasts.co.uk/Home/CompareBattle of the Breakfasts[/url

As I suspected when I first saw the crap TV advert, the fat/saturated fat, salt and calorific content of most non-Nestlé offerings such as poached eggs on toast appear to be heftily inflated and look pretty off-putting to the uneducated when placed alongside their cereals, which of course are shown as low in fat/sat fat, salt and calories, although being much higher in sugar. But the key point is that at a glance there are far more lower numbers alongside the Nestlé cereals.

Clever stuff, clearly banking on the public's obsession with 'low-fat' food, a lack of intense scrutiny and perhaps even lack of food education.

As cookies are biscuits they should only be consumed with milk. They tend to crumble too easily when dipped in tea. HTH.

Cookies? COOKIES? Another Americanism, I despair.

Dunking a biscuit in tea does require a certain degree of skill, which I guess is why children and the unskilled dunk in milk.

Personally, I don't see the point in baking a biscuit to a perfect degree of crunchiness only to dip it in a liquid, however briefly and in whatever liquid.
It improves neither the biscuit nor the liquid.

I enjoyed a couple of outstanding Cadbury Chocolate Chunk Cookies with a nice brew only minutes ago. No crumbling was experienced and they stood up to the brew far better than many biscuits.

And I'd challenge you to find a Millie's Cookie that crumbles. They tend to stick together in with a strange gooey, sugary, waxy consistency.

I'm actually not really a cookie eater, a good biscuit is much nicer, not that there's often any difference though 'cookies' tend to be bigger. In fact I don't have either all that often.

Lots of excuses are made about gyms - cost, distance travelled, lycra-fascists, poorly trained staff etc etc.

It strikes me as odd that we've become so obsessed with 'the gym' as a destination; is there anything else that we pay to do, that immediately becomes so opressive and burdensome? There's a massive, free gym right outside all our doors that requires nothing more than a pair of cheap trainers and a modest amount of willpower to use - it has no joining fee, no minimum term and can be used in a way that exactly suits our individual requirements. And yet hoardes of people drive home from work, get changed into clothing they don't feel comfortable in, then drive to a gym to partake in activities they find difficult, dull and costly.

I'm afraid that for all this fancy talk of food labelling, psychological hang-ups and perceived barriers, a large contributory factor towards the dreadful state of the nation's health is laziness and a desire for quick fixes; it's acually very easy to eat a balanced diet, to prepare your own food and to take a reasonable amount of exercise every week - lots of people choose not to however, then complain about the inevitable consequences. I do agree that the food, diet and exercise industries have marketed us into a state of compliance, but it is possible to choose a different way - it just takes a bit of effort to get started.

The fact that we need a sugar tax at all is, like so many of the country's current ills, down to plitical correctness. It is frowned upon to laugh and people and call them "fatso" or similar. If we had more of that we'd have less need for a sugar tax.

Yeah you're right.
Now feck off thicko.

Yeah, if we weren't polite to other people, we'd all be much better off in every way possible.

Indeed. And it's one of the sad things about the internet that while that is absolutely the case, somehow the online world (or at least this bit of it) seems to emphasise the differences. Which is most certainly not the whole story. And I'm every bit as guilty as anyone else.



A number of fair/good points here. I'd never thought about the "clinically thin", but absolutely.



I did for so many years. And breaking past that negativity has been one of the best things that's happened to me. That may sound to people like a massively OTT comment, but tb remembers me breaking down in tears when he was cooking a stew and I hadn't had chance to weight all the ingredients so as to work out the nutritional information for my diet diary. And weighing yourself twice a day – that's a tyranny. And it's easy to say that it's self-inflicted, but the pressures on people to be some idealised size, shape etc is enormous. And not least because, if you're not, you get easily characterised as lazy, greedy, slovenly ... all that sort of stuff.

I would go as far as to say it's mentally and intellectually crippling in large way. And I know it's just me. I've seen someone in a very, very similar situation since I got over it. It was actually very difficult to see – perhaps not least because it was a sort of mirror. But it is life limiting, and perhaps many people don't realise just how many forms it can take – as with what you've described here, for instance.



I think it would, yes. As I mentioned earlier, I'm not in favour of such a tax – or a fat tax either. I don't think that's remotely the way forward.

The trouble is it's a much more complex issue than I think many people realise – or even want to consider. And equally, I don't think there's a sort of magic bullet.