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Why America is fat

sawyerloggingon said:
What you are missing here is a very small serving of refined , prepared food gives you more calories than you need and not enough bulk to satisfy your hunger.
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I'm not missing that at all. What I stated is that it is a numbers game. I said nothing about the quality of the food, but that intake has to be balanced with output.
 
Higgins86 said:
It def varies on where you go within the US. However would you not say that helath food stores and farmers markets are a little pricey for the average American family?
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Health food stores yes but that does not mean you can't eat real food far cheaper than packaged food. Look at the price per ounce on packages and you will see what I mean. On farmers markets I disagree though. We shopped at one last weekend and my wife said it was actually cheaper than he super market for produce.
 
lizzie said:
I'm not missing that at all. What I stated is that it is a numbers game. I said nothing about the quality of the food, but that intake has to be balanced with output.
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The point you are still missing is it is very difficult to achieve that balance when you eat calorie laden prepared foods.
 
Higgins86 said:
I know in the UK a major issue is how popular take-away food has become. When I grew up getting take out was a rare treat but nowdays people seem to rely on it. The population is no longer cooking their own food and have no interest in eating fresh.
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I remember being a kid and going to McDonald's once or twice a year, and it'd be a huge thing. We'd celebrate our birthdays by going to McDonald's. Nowadays, I can eat there every day very cheaply. There are people who do it there every day. Had it not become something so natural and recurrent, it would be as sad as buying yourself a birthday cake every day for lunch.
 
sawyerloggingon said:
Health food stores yes but that does not mean you can't eat real food far cheaper than packaged food. Look at the price per ounce on packages and you will see what I mean. On farmers markets I disagree though. We shopped at one last weekend and my wife said it was actually cheaper than he super market for produce.
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I think a lot of it comes down to exposure and unfourtuntly in this day and age many people dont even think to shop at their local farmers market, all they know is the giant supermarkets because that's where the TV tells them to go.
 
lizzie said:
They will produce different results health-wise, not necessarily fat-wise. I'm not diabetic, but I have a strong tendency to have hypoglycemic reactions. If I eat sweet crap in the morning, and don't also include something with high quality protein, my sugar will bottom out about two hours later, and my pancreas starts dumping insulin. This increases my need for more calories to balance what I have coming in and going out, but everything is broken down to its most basic form, which the body utilizes to try and maintain balance, then stores the excess for future reserves if possible.
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Unfortunately, I AM a Type 1 diabetic, and have experience exactly what you speak of.

The sweet crap (love that term, lol) has a high glycemic base, which cause a spike in your glucose, causing your body's reaction, like an emergency situation, which produces excess insulin from the pancreas, and depending on just how high will determine how low your glucose will go. The body won't try and burn the fats from what you consumed, it's too busy reacting to the glucose issue, and those fats (unfortunately inevitable) won't be burned off and can be accumulated. The exception being if you immediately go into hard exercise, which one rarely will feel like after the seesaw of blood sugars.

If you switch out the crap for some fruits or low sugar type breakfast cereal, the glucose rise from the sugars in the fruits or carbs in the cereal will do a slower, more moderate rise, and the body has time to burn the fats that come through, so there is no real accumulation of fats in the body.

It's what is behind the standard of 'diet and exercise' as a package deal.
 
sawyerloggingon said:
The point you are still missing is it is very difficult to achieve that balance when you eat calorie laden prepared foods.
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No, I am not missing any point. Your thread is about the subject of why Americans are fat. Americans are fat because they are eating too much, and expending too little. It's about personal choices and responsibility. If I am fat (which I am not), it's because I am eating too much. I alone decide what I will eat. The corporate food industry doesn't force me to buy their crap. If I do, it's because I am either ignorant, or ignoring my own health.
 
Dr. Oz is a quack.

ozquack.jpg
 
lizzie said:
If I eat sweet crap in the morning, and don't also include something with high quality protein, my sugar will bottom out about two hours later, and my pancreas starts dumping insulin. This increases my need for more calories to balance what I have coming in and going out, but everything is broken down to its most basic form, which the body utilizes to try and maintain balance, then stores the excess for future reserves if possible.
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Good post.

And I think you're hitting at it without actually stating it clearly so I'll add that the insulin dump you're talking about tells our body that plenty of energy is readily available and that it should stop burning fat and start storing it.

With a diet that's high in sugar and/or processed-carbohydrate-heavy foods we're telling our boddies to store fat, not to burn it. It'll take longer to become obese on such a diet if we're only eating 1500 calories a day vs. 3000 calories a day, but we can (and many Americans will) get there eventually. Of course this pretends that people who eat diets that are sky-high in sugar and simple carbs are only eating the bear minimum necessary to fule themselves at a basal metabolic rate or to account for the very minimal amount of exercise most Americans get.
 
lizzie said:
No, I am not missing any point. Your thread is about the subject of why Americans are fat. Americans are fat because they are eating too much, and expending too little. It's about personal choices and responsibility. If I am fat (which I am not), it's because I am eating too much. I alone decide what I will eat. The corporate food industry doesn't force me to buy their crap. If I do, it's because I am either ignorant, or ignoring my own health.
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I agree with most of what you say here.

I'll just add, if children (Up to a certain age, eventually everyone has to take responsibility for themselves, you can't blame your parents forever.) are fat, their parents (Care-givers) are generally responsible.
 
lizzie said:
No, I am not missing any point. Your thread is about the subject of why Americans are fat. Americans are fat because they are eating too much, and expending too little. It's about personal choices and responsibility. If I am fat (which I am not), it's because I am eating too much. I alone decide what I will eat. The corporate food industry doesn't force me to buy their crap. If I do, it's because I am either ignorant, or ignoring my own health.
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Liz did you read the link or are you just knee jerk reacting?
 
Threegoofs said:
First off- watching Dr Oz is bad for your health. He's an idiot.

Secondly, the reality of the American diet is that huge portions of calorie dense foods are the norm, not the exception.
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I believe you about Dr Oz. I wish that my wife would. She listens to and believes everything that quack says.

And my wife is not a stupid person, she has a master's degree in linguistics from the University of Bucharest, and speaks four languages fluently. But Oz has her sucked in. She thinks what he says is coming out of the sky.
 
shrubnose said:
I believe you about Dr Oz. I wish that my wife would. She listens to and believes everything that quack says.

And my wife is not a stupid person, she has a master's degree in linguistics from the University of Bucharest, and speaks four languages fluently. But Oz has her sucked in. She thinks what he says is coming out of the sky.
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LMAO, women just love this guy, my wife too.
 
sawyerloggingon said:
I saw this guy on Dr Oz last night ( my wife makes me watch it OK :lol:) and I think he is onto something. Americans have started eating so much prepared food instead of real food they prepare themselves that they have become food junkies. The pushers are the refined food industry who go to great pains to make things artificially good. I don't make excuses for obese people though, it's your body and you choose what to put in it so if you chose this crap that they alter instead of real food you can only blame yourself for your weight.

In the hands of food manufacturers, cheese has become an ingredient,” Mr. Moss writes. Thus we have cheese-injected pizza crusts and cheese-draped frozen entrees, cheesy chips and cheezy crackers. Cheese and its processed derivatives were deployed across a gazillion new products and line extensions during decades when Americans, as a fat-avoidance tactic, were actually cutting their milk consumption by 75 percent. From a fat-consumption point of view, he says, “trading cheese for milk has been a poor bargain indeed.” And that is the nub of Mr. Moss’s case: By concentrating fat, salt and sugar in products formulated for maximum “bliss,” Big Food has spent almost a century distorting the American diet in favor of calorie-dense products whose consumption pattern has been mirrored by the calamitous rise in obesity[/URL] rates. Entire food categories were invented to support this strategy (Mr. Moss is particularly fascinated by Kraft’s near-billion-dollar line of Lunchables snack trays), as processors bent the American appetite to Wall Street’s will.
Mr. Moss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times who put the phrase “pink slime” into high rotation with a 2009 article on beef safety, deftly lays out the complicated marriage of science and marketing that got us where we are. Is that place a state of addiction? The book uses the language of addiction liberally — soldiers returned from World War II “hooked on Coke,” kids “lunge” for the sugar bowl, a typical salt lover is a “hapless junkie” — and it’s a metaphorical usage that must drive some research purists bananas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/18/books/salt-sugar-fat-by-michael-moss.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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Great post.

Most of what I eat comes from my own garden.

My problem is the beer here, which is great.

I'm trying to cut back, but it's not easy. I'm down to a liter and half a day, but that's about half a liter too much.
 
lizzie said:
That is the reason we have statistical charts, based on height and age. There are always exceptions to the rule, but if you are a certain age, and a specific height, you can generally follow the caloric requirements on that chart, unless you are in the exceptional range who has metabolic disorders.
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IN addition to the fact that caloric expenditure can vary between members of a group, it can also vary for the individual. For example, when one take in less calories, the body compensates by slowing down it's "burn rate". This has nothing to do with any metabolic disorder. It is completely natural and normal.

IOW, it's only simple if you ignore all the complexities of how our bodies function. Thousands of years of evolution have instilled a drive to consume more calories.
 
as a former fat guy who is now thin, i've thought a lot about the obesity problem. here's what i've come up with :

for tens of thousands of years, it has been feast or famine for humans all over the world. this is a large selective pressure for an instinct to eat as much as possible when food is available. it is also an enormous selective pressure for fat storage and efficient metabolism. the current status quo of cheap and available food 24 / 7 / 365 is not even a century old. throw in that so many jobs are now sedentary, and it's no big surprise that there's an obesity problem. not to mention that we live in the world's kitchen.

why are we fatter than Europe? i'd say it's the way the country is set up. we have to drive everywhere, and don't walk as much. how did i figure this out? i started walking everywhere, ditched elevators, and started doing things the hard way like push mowing instead of riding. those activities burn a lot of calories.

the cure for obesity is keep track of what you're eating, and always keep moving. it's daily work, but it's completely worth it.
 
Helix said:
as a former fat guy who is now thin, i've thought a lot about the obesity problem. here's what i've come up with :

for tens of thousands of years, it has been feast or famine for humans all over the world. this is a large selective pressure for an instinct to eat as much as possible when food is available. it is also an enormous selective pressure for fat storage and efficient metabolism. the current status quo of cheap and available food 24 / 7 / 365 is not even a century old. throw in that so many jobs are now sedentary, and it's no big surprise that there's an obesity problem. not to mention that we live in the world's kitchen.

why are we fatter than Europe? i'd say it's the way the country is set up. we have to drive everywhere, and don't walk as much. how did i figure this out? i started walking everywhere, ditched elevators, and started doing things the hard way like push mowing instead of riding. those activities burn a lot of calories.

the cure for obesity is keep track of what you're eating, and always keep moving. it's daily work, but it's completely worth it.
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Guess what? Europe (Including France.) is catching up to the USA in the fat problem area.

I also do a lot of walking. We have a car, but I seldom use it. I cut most of our grass (We have a 1/2 hectare garden/orchard with a lawn tractor and the rest with a power push mower.

But I'm still a little heavy. I'm working on that.
 
Taste is a pleasure and tasting good things can distract from bad things almost like a drug . Also a problem could be out of boredom and the availability of food , besides that the healthiest of foods that are tasty and low calories cost a bit more then the foods that are un healthy and cheap . Example is the 3 dollar strawberries compared to the one dollar burger at a fast food establishment . It is a bit abhorrent to think about our main concern is obesity where most of the world suffers from malnutrition and the lack of clean water .
 
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