Why America is fat

[shrubnose]

What you eat is more important than how much you eat.....for example if you over eat on fruit and veggies do you think your body would have the same effect as overeating bread/pasta?.....I've never heard of an overweight person claiming to overeat their veggies...in fact most Americans do not consume even the recommended daily servings of veggies per day...and no french fries is not a veggie.

I remember about 20 or 30 years ago some school food program tried to classify ketchup as a fruit or veggie and got shot down.

 

[jamesrage]

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

I do not think it is the food that is the problem.When my grandfather was a kid he ate hamburgers, french fries cooked in animal fat not vegetable oil, organ meats,stuff with all kinds of butter in it and all sorts of other unhealthy stuff. And if his stories are correct then candy bars were much larger and they were able to purchase big bags of candy really cheap when he was younger. And for many of us it was that way for our parents too.Heck when many of us were kids they still cooked stuff mostly in animal fat, and boxed cereal had more sugar in it. Our food today is a lot healthier than the food back then. Heck when many of us were kids P.E./Gym was still a mandatory subject in school. The problem why America has a obesity problem is the fact many Americans live a sedimentary life style.We have sedimentary jobs and instead of playing outside and doing lots of physical activities on our off time we site inside and watch TV,talk/text on phone, surf the internet and or play video games.

 

[sawyerloggingon]

I do not think it is the food that is the problem.When my grandfather was a kid he ate hamburgers, french fries cooked in animal fat not vegetable oil, organ meats,stuff with all kinds of butter in it and all sorts of other unhealthy stuff. And if his stories are correct then candy bars were much larger and they were able to purchase big bags of candy really cheap when he was younger. And for many of us it was that way for our parents too.Heck when many of us were kids they still cooked stuff mostly in animal fat, and boxed cereal had more sugar in it. Our food today is a lot healthier than the food back then. Heck when many of us were kids P.E./Gym was still a mandatory subject in school. The problem why America has a obesity problem is the fact many Americans live a sedimentary life style.We have sedimentary jobs and instead of playing outside and doing lots of physical activities on our off time we site inside and watch TV,talk/text on phone, surf the internet and or play video games.

Can't find anything do disagree with there but I still think all the prepared food Americans eat these days is a player.

 

[CanadaJohn]

I am old enough to remember the days before everyone had a TV.

And I don't remember as many fat people as we have today.

Most people were in pretty good shape back then, on average.

There was a time when being obese was a sign of prosperity - the old robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as examples.

 

[Ontologuy]

It's a simple numbers game. More calorie intake in, less energy expended= weight gain. No matter what you are eating, how much fat content is in it, how much sugar, or how much protein, how much salt, processed and fortified, or raw in its most basic form, if you eat more calories than you expend, your weight will go up. Imo, the real problems are laziness and anxiety. People often don't eat out of need, but out of nervous anxiety, and they are trying to mentally and emotionally feel better.

In addition ..

.. There are taste additives and preservatives chemicals in food items today that have an adverse side-effect of instructing the liver to store fat and to do so very soon upon food intake, before other body functions can determine if the new food intake is needed for energy right away .. and thus people grow larger, have less energy, even if they cut consumption volume .. and they wonder why.

The general rule is that if the additive/preservative has three or more syllables in it, don't eat the food it's in.

 

[polgara]

There was a time when being obese was a sign of prosperity - the old robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as examples.

Greetings, CJ. :2wave:

:agree: Looking at the art of that period and earlier, one could almost conclude that everyone was obese. Double chins were a common feature on both men and women whose portraits were painted by the masters. They were proud that they could afford multiple-course meals which often consisted of many meat choices per meal as well as a half-dozen dessert choices. It's only in the paintings showing the common man at work do we see thin, gaunt-looking men, women, and children. Today obesity seems to afflict the poor, while the wealthy are thin. Interesting to see how perceptions change over time.... :shrug:

 

[Andalublue]

You were in a part of town that does not want real food. Other parts of America are very different. Where I live there are health food stores all over and every super market has a health food section and lots of real food.

Delighted to hear it. I didn't want to believe that that was how it was for the majority.

 

[Andalublue]

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?

My impression was that food in general (although, as I said, I didn't find much on the healthy/organic side) was about 20-40% cheaper in the States than in the UK. Even in top-end restaurants I thought that prices were pretty low and then, when comparing average incomes of American friends doing similar jobs to me and my friends, they were paid around 30% more. So no, I'd say it's more a matter of what people are used to paying rather than what they can sensibly afford.

 

[DaveFagan]

Food is the source of many of society's problems.

Breakfast is the first act of violence every day.

"Breakfast, bacon and eggs: a day's work for a chicken, a lifetime commitment for a pig."unknown
" Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But then I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain

 

[ABC10]

They are fat cause they are eating and not smoking. Also doing the "munchies" while drugging does not help.

 

[DDD]

Well unless something is done to meet the future projections of overpopulation America may not afford to be fat by 2050 according to this study:

References:

Ray, D. K., Mueller, N. D., West, P. C., & Foley. J. A. (2013). Yield trends are insufficient to double global crop production by 2050. PLoS ONE, 8 (6): e66428 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0066428

Current global food production trajectory won't meet 2050 needs