Food and Events

Mr McRae is silent on the conflicts that a demographic shift will surely bring. In the same issue, Nic Cicutti shows how, in the context of a downsizing state facing many rival welfare claims, cutting the cake can become highly contentious ("An unnecessary gamble..."). Already in the US we see budget battles between spending on the young (nurseries and schools) versus the old (health care and nursing homes). Given that we all start young and end up old this may seem an odd and sad basis for social conflict. But since class, sex and race all form bases for distributional struggle, the trends described by McRae make it all but certain that there will be age wars as well. Aidan Foster-CarterUniversity of Leeds.

To call science an unnatural mode of thought is to confuse its methods with its content which, granted, is often counter-intuitive (Lewis Wolpert, Review, 9 March). In its use of inference, observation and imagination, and testing by reason and evidence, science is only a more rigorous form of everyday thinking. Nature may be value-free, but the picture science creates is a construction from a human perspective: selective and partial. Why can't he see that science is possible at the level of appearances, as in social science, art or technology, and can be just as scientific in its method and surprising in its explanations as at the level of the unobservable atom? His obsolete model alienates the uninitiated and drives them further into the arms of superstition. Mandy TangoEpsom, Surrey. In Your article on Kevin Maxwell's new media enterprise, you say that "MGN pensioners defrauded by Robert Maxwell have had their pensions guaranteed in full..." ("Maxwells back with TV and media group", 9 March) This cannot go unchallenged.

It is a myth that has appeared in a number of press reports abut the pension fund and it is inaccurate. I declare an interest as a recipient of a Maxwell (MGN) pension. It is true that pensions are now being honoured but there remains a serious shortfall from the original entitlement. Moreover it has been made clear that there is now no likelihood that future funding will ever be able to correct this shortfall or compensate for past losses.Geoffrey GoodmanLondon NW7. Yet another sports revolution zoomed off the Government's launch pad on Friday when the Prime Minister announced a pounds 30m scheme to create an army of community sports coaches who will tour schools and centres in search of the talented youngsters who will become tomorrow's stars. I hope they'll be able to spot them among all those fat kids.

A report from the National Study of Health and Growth issued three days earlier had carried the far more significant revelation that our schoolchildren are getting chubbier by the year. In a survey of more than 10,000 primary pupils over the past 20 years it was discovered that English boys aged 10 had become 17 per cent fatter and girls 7 per cent. In Scotland, the ballooning was worse; 24 per cent in boys and 22 per cent in girls. Junk food and a slobbish lifestyle have probably played their part but lack of exercise was the principal reason put forward by doctors at St Thomas's Hospital, London, from where the study was conducted. Comparison with research carried out in Sweden and the United States suggests that children in those countries were not following this fatness trend. Part of the inactivity is due to parents being less inclined to let their children walk or cycle to school - the average child walks 200 miles a year compared to 250 a decade ago - and this is understandable in these violent times but this shortfall is by no means compensated for once they reach school.These statistics, alarming as they are, should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the slow but remorseless decline of school sport during the last 20 or so years. The tendency to let loose upon the nation a growing number of flabby, feckless and unfit youngsters has been proceeding unchecked for too long. But if we can ignore the fact that a distressing proportion are not very well educated either, we are capable of ignoring anything.Sport is just one in a queue of neglected priorities in education but, as last week's report proves, it has an additional importance to the health and well-being of the nation.