HBO's series: The Weight of the Nation

Great Debates
1

HBO has started showing a new 4-part documentary called “The Weight of the Nation”.

It explains how Americans are suffering a terrible epidemic of people being overweight or obese and how this is just killing us. The consequences are huge expenses in medical costs and terrible suffering from disease. I’m sure you have all heard this kind of message before. But this series is showing how the problem has now passed the critical point.

It traces the reasons to the government providing subsidies to farmers to grow corn and soybeans and how the industrialization of the agriculture business means that it is extremely cheap to buy foods that contain high levels of sugar, salt and fat.

The result is an explosion in the rates of obesity, Diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, high blood pressure etc.

Their conclusion is that just as the health profession and the population in general took on the tobacco industry and almost eliminated smoking, we have to take on this problem with our food and arrange to switch our attitudes to favor healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables.

BTW, did you know that only one percent of all American farmland is used to grow fruits and vegetables? Almost 98 or 99 percent is used to grow corn or soybeans which are converted to cheap sources of artificial sweetners.

The basic idea is that the current state of affairs is killing us. Our food may be cheap, but we pay a huge cost for it in medical costs as the result of eating this cheap food that contains high calories but very little nutrition.

I’m sure that I have not explained this very well and that someone else could do a much better job.

But, I’d like to as the question, “What can we do in our everyday lives to begin making the transition from unhealthy eating habits to healthy habits?”

Have any of you begun to make those kinds of changes?

What would you suggest as the best kinds of changes we can make today?

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I’ve definitely made a lot of changes in my everyday life to transition from unhealthy eating habits to healthy habits. It has involved joining Weight Watchers and using their points program to limit my calorie intake, but I have also investigated and implemented low-carb eating, which has had a HUGE impact on my appetite. I suspect I could have done the low-carb without the WW and it still would have had an impact.

Basically, before I changed the way I ate, I would go through multiple cycles of hunger throughout the day. Not the ‘stomach-rumbling because it’s empty’ type of hunger, but the brain yelling ‘feed me!’ type of hunger. Now I do still get hungry, but only when I haven’t eaten for a long time and it is genuine hunger from lack of food. I probably haven’t described that very well.

Whilst I’ve always eaten fresh fruit and vegetables, I ate more bread, pasta, rice, muesli. Now I eat very little bread, pasta, rice, and fruit and vegetables, along with meat, are probably the core of my diet.

My diet now feels a lot more ‘simple’ and ‘fresh’, which I like. :slight_smile:

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Good for you! Glad to hear that. Keep up the good work.

I’m hoping I can make some similar changes. But I’m also hoping to begin putting some pressure on the Federal Government to help in the process.

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No one in my family is obese or has any associated issues. We’re aware of the dangers of over-eating, processed food, general healthy dietary this and that… so we’re not doing anything.

As far as the rest of society, information is out there freely. Consumers drive production. And if consumers demand healthier food, simply with their wallets and choices, production practices will change to match.

I watched some of that series and found it to be over-alarmist. While I agree that there is an obesity problem, I don’t think it’s as potentially catastrophic as the series makes it out to be. For one - the measure by which obesity rates are estimated is fundamentally flawed.

Smells like the y2k scare.

5

I don’t have a TV so I can’t watch the series, but it sounds pretty similar to what we’ve heard from countless other sources in recent years.

Personally I do agree that federal agriculture subsidies are a bad idea. We should simply eliminate every penny of ag subsides in one fell swoop. It would not only lead to healthier food, but also would help family farms to survive, be good for the environment, and might even help a bit with that deficit thing that people are talking about. It’s a win-win situation for everybody exception the big agriculture companies and their lobbyists.

Other than that, food choices are individual choices and I see little that can be done collectively to combat obesity. Diet is a complex issue and public health campaigns necessarily tend to simplistic solutions. When we convinced people that fat was bad, the food industry responded with low-fat junk food. When we convinced them that cholesterol was bad, the industry responded with cholesterol-free junk food. Likewise with sodium, sugar, trans fats, and so forth. The original food pyramid put carbohydrates at the bottom, which seemed like a good idea, but eventually lead people to cram on starchy foods like pasta.

When I was growing up, my family ate a common sense diet with fruits and vegetables at every meal, small portion sizes, and desserts only occasionally. None of us ever got fat.

6

Stop promoting unnecessary caesarian births:

C-sections double childhood obesity risk, scientists say

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Start a program of public floggings for nanny-state liberals.

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Seems to me the OP was asking what can we, as individuals, do to make changes to our diets. But nice wingnut knee-jerk overreaction.