Challenge: How to Stop Obesity?

Great Debates
21

I don’t think anything is going to change until it becomes as inexpensive and convenient to eat healthy foods as it is to eat unhealthy ones.

My boyfriend is trying to stay on a low-cholesterol diet, and our food bills and food preparation time have skyrocketed. It’s astonishing how economical and how easy it is to eat stuff that kills you. It’s equally astonishing how insanely expensive it is to eat stuff that’s good for you. Especially if you don’t have hours of time every week to devote to food preparation.

I suspect the only thing that’s going to drive down the price of healthy foods and increase their convenience is for manufacturers to realize that killing off their customers isn’t really good policy. But it’s so easy to sell sugar and fat, because of the immediate gratification involved, that having these same companies sell healthy stuff would be a massive challenge.

The only solution I can think of to the problem is for someone out there to start producing people kibble

22

I’d prefer not to picture that gym class…

MY EYYYYYYYYYYES!!! THE GOGGLES, THEY DO NOTHING!!!

23

I’d start by throwing a lot less money at the problem. The U.S. government has spent millions and millions on “research” into nutrition, creating food pyramids, publicizing them, setting menus for school lunches, etc. The amout of money spent could probably be set inversely and set against a graph of the median adult weight in this country and you’d think they were the same graph. The federal government does not know what you should eat, and they shouldn’t be spending your money to tell you.

Next, we don’t need new taxes. We just need to stop using taxes already collected to subside stupid choices. In particular, a large amount of the “job training” credits that everyone loves so much go to “train” teenagers to prepare fast food. That stuff is already popular enough – let the fast food giants “train” teenagers with the money they collect from selling their product, rather than using federal subsidies to lower their product costs. That’s dozens of millions, maybe more, money not to throw at the problem.

The government also subsidizes food production, in particular grain production. In addition to the corn problem discussed above, much livestock is brought up on products made from subsidized grain sources. Lynn alluded to the crazy portions of restaurant meals – let the cost of those portions reflect the unsubsidized cost of producing them and you’d go a long way toward fixing the problem. That’s billions not thrown at the problem.

That’s the “too much food” side. The other side is exercise. This is trickier, as the switch from a manufacturing economy to a service one leads to a more sedentary workday for many people. But here again, the government is paying for (a more intangible) part of the bill. Replace all (all!) highway construction funds with tolls and gas taxes and watch more people walk or bike to work, maybe walk around a town square instead of flitting from shop to shop in their cars, etc. But that’s small potatoes – most of the damage to our health caused by suburbanization is done, and responsibility for fixing it lies with individuals.

24

A medication that is used as an anti-convulsant has been found to inhibit compulsive eating (and other compulsive behaviors). My shrink has me taking that and my interest in food is just gone. My calorie intake is very low. I keep power bars around and take vitamins and minerals.

I’m not terribly unhappy with my weight, but I wouldn’t mind losing as much as thirty pounds or so.

A few years ago this calorie intake would have dropped my weight quickly. Now I’m going to have to exercise more.

There are just too many variables involved in weight loss. Scientists admit they don’t have all the answers and I believe them. For some people telling them to “eat less” is like telling an asthmatic to breath deeply.

Any experts on compulsive behaviors and brain chemistry here?

25

My high school had lots of vending machines: about 6 pop machines (Coke, Sprite, Root Beer, etc), and two “juice” machines that dispensed Gatorade, bottled water and bottles of juice. This is in addition to 2 candy vending machines. This school had about 1100 students. (This is in Canada, but Canada is getting pretty fat these days too, probably second fattest behind the US).

Now, the problem wasn’t that the sugar:nutrition availability ratio was so out of whack, or even that the two healthier vending machines were kind of in a strange hallway away from the main halls, but that the pop machines dispensed the 355ml cans for a buck, or the 500-whatever-ml bottles for $1.25, while the bottled water, juice and Gatorade were $1.50-$2.00. Granted, the bottles were slightly larger, but for poor high school students who may only have five bucks to spend on drinks throughout the week, this makes a difference.

The mall I work in now doesn’t even have any machines that dispense juice. Iced tea is as healthy as it gets without having to wait in line at the food court, something I don’t always have time for.

How many offices are the same? Three coke machines down the hall, but to get a bottle of orange juice, you need to go to the deli across the street.

It’s good to see Subway scrapping its way up the fast food ranks, but ordering a footlong meatball sub with four pounds of toppings, with a large drink, a half-dozen cookies and a bag of chips still doesn’t constitute as healthy, nor will it make you Jared.

Healthy food and drinks are more expensive and often just harder to get access to, and even when we get there, we demand obscene amounts of food. Fast food chains can get away with it because they can put sawdust in the milkshakes and chicken grain in the beef to inflate our sense of bang for the buck, but everyone is getting hurt by this, as it’s destroyed our sense of value when it comes to food.

What can we do? For a start, vending machines besides juice dispensers in elementary schools: gone. A kid doesn’t need to start a four-can-a-day pop addiction at age six. In highschools, I’d impose certain laws about the ratio of pop:juice machines, and guidelines about pricing and placement. Why do we need two identical coke machines side by side? One coke, one juice, paired up all over the school. Set the prices the same and you might get the message across. Restrictions in menus would probably also be a good thing. I hate the new fad of franchise restaurants being added to schools in lieu of or even in addition to the regular cafeteria. That has to stop, IMO.

In offices and the such, you can’t really impose laws, but I like the idea of certain tax breaks, maybe related to worker’s compensation or something. Fat people with heart problems are going to start to drag on the economy. Maybe if a place of employment can follow similar guidelines like I laid out for highschools, they’d be entitled to benefits or breaks. Not unreasonable, and it would actually be economically beneficial in the long run. In 30 years, how much of the population is simply going to be too fat to be reasonably productive?

I think there IS a solution, or a series of solutions, to slow and eventually reverse chronic fatness, and it will start in getting a regulated handle on fast food culture.

26

Now, the problem wasn’t that the sugar:nutrition availability ratio was so out of whack, or even that the two healthier vending machines were kind of in a strange hallway away from the main halls, but that the pop machines dispensed the 355ml cans for a buck, or the 500-whatever-ml bottles for $1.25, while the bottled water, juice and Gatorade were $1.50-$2.00. Granted, the bottles were slightly larger, but for poor high school students who may only have five bucks to spend on drinks throughout the week, this makes a difference.

Unless you are talking about all-natural juice, it has almost as much sugar as soda does. Especially orange juice, oy.

And Gatorade may be (sort of) low in sugar but it’s packed with calories. When I first started working out I bought myself one out of the vending machine, looked at the label and thought “there is no way I am going to drink something that has half the calories I just burned exercising.”

If you can ever get some Propel (made my Gatorade), try it. It’s an excellent alternative to soda/juice and has 30 calories in the whole bottle.

27

Unless you can work out a way to legislate against gluttony and laziness, I don’t think the problem of obesity is conquerable. I believe Australia is third behind the US and the UK in the fattest-people-on-earth stakes.

28

Many people are overweight and obese due to there lifestyles. Average american’s are much more sedetary, compared to the generations before us. If you were to evaluate the lifestyles of civilians in europe, germany for example, they use public transportation much more, and frequently walk. Fast food globalization is on the rise, while fast food is rising in other countries, I believe you’ll find their rates of obesity will rise as well. IIRC, Mcdonalds was franchised by Ray Kroc in the 1950s and gradually went on to become one of the most popular fast food chains, while fast food business, and the idea of the drive through, revolutionized how americans ate. Our choices of food are obviously much more different from generations before us, and you’ll find that our serving sizes continue to rise.

Installing vending machines with healthy foods at Schools is only one option to allow children to eat healthier, but food is a choice, and many children are reluctant to give up food they enjoy eating, because it tastes good, for something that is different and whose taste doesn’t compare.

Our diets contain much more saturated fat and we continue to exercise less. These are obvious stereotypes, but I believe there isn’t one way to improve an increasing “obese epidemic”.

Those who eat more(consume more calories) than what their body requires for everyday use(metabolic rate), will find that they will gain weight. Combine that with less exercise and its obvious obesity will continue to rise.

I recall reading a statistic that 80% of the obese, eat emotionally. That is, consume food other than for physical hunger. This is easy to due when you were raised in a society that consumes cake and ice cream for birthdays and eats food at family get togethers. That would leave a mere 20% of obese peoples, overweight due to poor food decisions. If you eat only when your hungry and stop when you’re not, you will not become obese. That is, unless your metabolism has been lowered substanstially and you do little physical activity. After learning more about food & nutrition than most people will ever learn in there lifetime(you might not be able to tell because I failed to go in depth in my post), I’ve come to know and realize that our bodies are machines that you should trust, more than anything else.

Any time you starve yourself, you’ll find that your metabolism decreases in order to perform normal daily functions without becoming burned out. If you overconsume, the food that is eaten will have a higher percentage be stored as fat, thus this is food your body doesn’t need, and thanks to evolution, your body may think a famine is on the way, and adjust your metabolism accordingly.

Americans should care to be healthy, should care to be fit, more than anything else. Attempting to regulate food is ridiculous, because food is a choice. If you choose to view your body as a machine(which it is) and give it the fuel it needs(healthy foods), and begin to take care of it(more exercise), obesity will decline. As I mentioned in the statistic above, emotional eating is a reason why americans can become alarming obese. Any sort of diet is seen as a restriction, and its only human nature to want to go against a restriction especially when it comes to foods that you enjoy. Choosing to eat healthy for you and to change your lifestyle is a choice, just as eating unhealthy foods. Diets don’t work due to the restriction.

I think you’ll find that anyone can lose weight and gain weight. Those who are substantially obese are obese for a reason, if they stop overconsuming and listen to there body, whether it be healthy foods or not, eating food solely for the purpose of hunger, rather than emotions, you’ll find that weight and food isn’t an issue anymore, and you won’t be overweight. Increasing physical activity and exercise substantially will only aid the process. Your body is a machine, treat it as such.

29

Public transport.

Seriously. If every household and office were within 1/2 mile of a bus stop or train station, they would walk an average of 1/4 mile getting to or from the stations. Do that four times a day (each end of the commute, each way) and that’s 1/2 hour of excercise every day, which is a pretty good start. And this will discourage people from getting dependent on their cars, so they’d be more likely to use public tranport for other types of trips, from short shopping trips to 300-mile weekend trips. I know from experience that once you get used to using a car, you start using it for all your trips even when it clearly isn’t the best choice.

Of course this isn’t a cost-effective solution if obesity were the only problem to solve. But one can expect many other benefits: reduced pollution, fewer car accidents, reduced drunk driving (by providing a way to get home from the bar), and ultimately, reduced dependence on foreign oil.

30

Sigh…

31

Make it a national program to lower the cost of healthful foods like fruits, vegetables, and lean meats, whole grains and such. Give extra funds to the farmers, cut the prices on the shelves at the grocery store.

Increase the price of fast food.

Truly - you’ll find it hard to get a meal of “healthful soup, veggies and Dip + veggie juice” under 5$, but 5$ will buy you a whack of stuff off of the dollar menu at McDonalds… and 99cents will buy you two crappy frozen Pot Pies that contain 90% of your “recommended” fat intake for the day. Each.

Fatty, unhealthful foods are cheap. They’re cheap to produce, and therefore damned cheap to sell. Take out the fat, increase the price. Heck, just look at Milk… it’s cheaper to buy whole milk than skim milk…

When the average person struggles to get by, that’s sometimes all they can actually afford. Eating well costs a fortune. :frowning: Joining a Gym isn’t always an option, especially if the budget is really tight… It’s a vicious circle, t’certainly is.

32

Taxing fatty foods doesn’t work in the day and age of the Atkins diet. You could make the argument that taxing all of those “carbos”–grains, fruits, vegetables–would make more sense. Hell, some Adkinites are now pushing pork rinds as the new “rice cake”.

Bah. Leave the food alone.

33

Joining a Gym isn’t always an option, especially if the budget is really tight.

Very true.

Tax breaks/credits for joining a gym?

Why or why not?

34

Taxing something just gives politicians more money to spend. The more you tell kids they shouldn’t eat something the faster the food sells. If you want to spend money on social policy then build park facilties that are fun to use and require large amounts of energy to use. Once you get someone hooked on excercise it is easy to steer them into better food choices.

Personally, I think there is a HUGE market for well-balanced foods. I would love to go into a market and buy freshly prepared (or frozen) food that is good for me. Most (all) of the low fat products have a higher salt content in relation to non-low fat foods.

If I were a school Superintendent I would use the above philosophy and include classes in gourmet junk food. It’s all in the presentation. You don’t have to tell kids that it is a class in nutrition. You make nutrition a by-product of the “sale”.

35

As Manhattan mentioned, massive corn subsidies keep the price of corn, corn sweetners (HFCS), and deadly grain-fed beef unnaturally low.

An old article from the LATimes about Earl Butz and corn subsidies.

Another article about sugar in general and HFCS in specific, which humans are not metabolically equipped to handle in anything like the dosages Westerners consume.

BTW, my wife is a dietician.

36

People have the right to eat what they want to, but do they have the right to feed their children a diet that evidence increasingly shows is shortening their lives?

I mean: we would berate a parent that never fed its child any fruit, so it never got any Vitamin C, and developed scurvy.

Allowing them to develop diabetes or any other obesity-related disease is just as bad.

Most people need to exercise more, and this should at least be put in place at school, with more physical education lessons. Exercise while young is critical for building bone density.

37

Istara vitamin C is found in lots of stuff, not just fruit.

You would have to try REALLY hard to give your kid scurvy.

38

Am I missing something? If someone doesn’t want to be obese, tell them to get their fat ass outside and exercise! Seriously! IANABodybuilder or nutritionist, but I try & try to tell people who want to lose weight, it is not about eating less, its about exercising more! I eat anything I want and don’t gain significant weight! Because I have conditioned my body to metabolize foods at a higher rate to sustain the energy exerted from exercising.

And for those who are happy with their floppy, saggy bodies… just don’t bitch about not fitting into things around me, and don’t expect my pity for your lack of care for your health.

Oh yeah, and don’t try saying “I don’t have time to exercise” unless you work 20 hours a day to support your family. Just wake up earlier, 45 min is all you need.

39

I think you are missing the point of the thread, which is about how to encourage people to excercise and/or eat less. The modern society makes it too easy to go about our daily lives without getting sufficient excercise.

It’s both. If you eat more than you metabolize, you gain weight.

40

Actually, “nutritionist” is a meaningless term. Anybody can call themselves a nutritionist. I’m a nutritionist. I hereby declare you a nutritionist. Use your powers only for good.