Writing Task 2
Some people have an unhealthy diet and do not have enough exercise.
How can we encourage people to have a healthy lifestyle?
In this short essay, I will outline a few ways in which we can encourage people to lead
healthier lifestyles.
In Britain, we have a health care system that is free to use. British people often describe
this as a free health care system, but that is not quite correct. The system is funded
through general taxation. This means that there is no direct incentive to be healthier.
People pay for the system regardless of whether – or how often – they use it. If people
had to pay when they used the system, they might pay more attention to their health.
Alternatively, individual insurance could cover the cost.
Another possibility is to make unhealthy food less attractive by making it more
expensive. This could be done fairly easily in the cases of processed food and sugary or
fatty food. One method would be to increase tax on those food items that are considered
unhealthy. A second alternative would be to reduce tax on healthy foods, such as
unprocessed fruit and vegetables.
A third way to try to persuade people to lead healthier lifestyles might be through the use
of warnings on food packaging. At the moment, in Britain and many other countries, food
packaging shows information such as calories, sugar, fat, vitamins, minerals, etc. A
simple addition could be the use of colour coding to indicate how healthy the food is. For
example, red could indicate that the food is unhealthy whilst green could be used for
healthy food.
In addition, we need to encourage people to take more exercise. In China, there are often
simple exercise machines in residential compounds. Perhaps this is an innovation that we
could import. If free exercise is easily available, people are more likely to take the
opportunity to shed a little weight. Admittedly, this would be a more costly method than
improving food labelling or taxing unhealthy food more.
To summarise, I think that there several methods we could implement to encourage
people to be healthier.
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