Healthy Vending Arrives At Beacon Hospital May 4th, 2017

Did you know that the average vending machine contains as much as 10,000 grams of refined sugar? 10,000 grams! And here’s another one for you; snacking on a bag of crisps every day (as many people do) can add the equivalent of drinking almost five litres of cooking oil per year to your diet.

With 65% of Irish adults consuming 2 or more of these snacks every day (Department of Health, 2016), it’s no wonder there is a stark rise in obesity and all that goes with it – diabetes, heart disease, even cancer.

Beacon Hospital took a stance against this and never had killer vending machines in their public areas. They were of the opinion they were in the business of treating health problems, not creating them. An opinion you would think should be shared by all of our hospitals. But not so. Most of our hospitals have a number of sugar-loaded vending machines conveniently placed around their facilities. One well known Dublin hospital even has one at the entrance to their diabetic clinic. Imagine that? That’s like having a full bar at an alcohol anonymous meeting.

In their defense, up to now there really wasn’t a viable alternative. If you wanted to provide convenient snacks for staff, patients and visitors onsite, you could only choose a selection of high-sugar, high-fat, processed junk because that’s all there was.

Now though, there is an alternative. The Healthy Fox is on a mission to make healthy snacks more convenient than unhealthy junk. We provide a healthy vending machine that contains only natural snacks and drinks (with ingredients that you can recognize and pronounce). In fact, we don’t even like to call it a vending machine because of the commonly held (and well earned) perception of vending.

Beacon Hospital recently introduced our healthy vending service and now offers a variety of healthy snacks and drinks for everyone onsite to enjoy. Hopefully more of our hospitals will follow their lead. It’s great that they are all smoke-free zones, but now it’s time they switched over to also being junk-free zones. And, if they’d like to, we’d love to help.