Brits should be ashamed of how they treat their grandparents according to health secretary Jeremy Hunt, who now says residential care should be a last resort as he sets out plans to tackle the woes of 800,000 ‘forgotten’ lonely elderly people.
Mr Hunt makes it onto the Daily Mail’s front page with the instruction that we should be looking towards Asian nations for how to treat our elderly, something which the Mail speculates he may have learned from his Chinese-born wife.
He said: ‘In those countries, when living alone is no longer possible, residential care is a last rather than a first option.’
‘And the social contract is stronger because, as children see how their own grandparents are looked after, they develop higher expectations of how they too will be treated when they get old.’
‘If we are to tackle the challenge of an ageing society, we must learn from this.’
Gardening and other physical chores around the home is not great exercise, the Independent reports.
Until now it has been thought that housework counted towards moderate physical activity targets, but a new study showed people who lived by this rule were ‘heavier’ than those choosing other forms of exercise.
Over at the Telegraph, people hoping to conceive children are given some sobering advice, as new research suggests just three glasses of wine a week could reduce their chances.
US researchers studied women undergoing fertility treatment, finding that women who abstained completely from alcohol had a 90% success rate with IVF over a course of three years.
But University of Sheffield fertiliy expert Dr Allan Pacey warned that the study could point to other factors as well, such as how stressed the women felt at the time.
