Thankfully, I’ve never really had a weight problem. Lord knows I probably should, because I love to cook and eat. But between tennis, hockey, and my newest hobby, cycling, I’m fine, maybe go 5lbs. overweight during the winter.
So it really pisses me off now when I go into a store and find it’s almost FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE to find regular food! Especially dairy products. Do you know how hard it is to find regular yogurt or cottage cheese anymore? Everything is light, lite, fat-free, no-fat, light-fat, non-fat, less-fat…ARRGGH! Just give me my regular cottage cheese! I want my regular yogurt!
Look, I understand that there are waaaay too many people who should be buying nothing but fat-free stuff - but even if 25% of us Americans are bigger than my grandpa’s old Ford truck, that still leaves 75% of us who’d like our food with flavor, thank you.
I know, my first two threads shouldn’t be pit rants, but I needed to get this one off my chest. I feel better now.
In every store I’ve been to, the full fat food is directly next to the low fat food- particularly things like yogurt, cottage cheese, sour cream, etc. Actually, not even particularly that, now that I think about it. I have never had an issue finding one or the other because the two types are always right there.
I would like to add a rider to this rant: the human diet is supposed to be 30% fat for us to stay healthy (adults, that is. Kids’ diets should actually be higher). Granted, that fat should come from things like nuts and fish rather than McDonalds, but still.
That said, I have no trouble finding an array of fat-content foods - from full fat milk to skimmed and everything in between. I would hate to think that stores aren’t offering higher-fat content healthy foods, considering how much dairy kids eat.
I think I read a post here on the SD boards about some mother who was feeding her two-year old kid low-fat milk :rolleyes:
Obviously this isn’t a problem at larger stores - the Fairway I sometimes go to, for example. But here in NYC we often have to do shopping at smaller delis etc that don’t have a lot of shelf space, I guess. The deli near my house this morning had only low-fat cottage cheese. My bad for not stocking up on my last Fresh Direct order…
I eat cottage cheese with fruit, preferably fresh melon, and thus always buy the nonfat, and honestly can’t tell a taste difference. But other dairy products? I don’t care if it’s bad for me, nonfat dairy products are the work of the devil! And considering my hubby grew up in dairy country where he’d wait for the right farmer to bring his milk in to the local dairy before picking up the family’s milk for the day, it’s amazing that we’ve managed to work our way down to 2% milk. Going below that would be the tortures of the damned, however!
Could it be that many more foods are being marketed as light or low-fat? To the best of my recollection, yogurt was always considered a low-calorie food compared to ice cream and the like, and was comparable to 2% milk in that regard. So even though there’s now fat free yogurt, they still market regular yogurt to dieters by proclaiming it to be low fat.
I dunno where you live, but I’m a little overweight and I find it difficult to find decent diet food – and I work right down the street from a supermarket the size of a department store. And by “decent” I mean “doesn’t taste like fermented ass.” I’ve tried a few of the things down their “health food” aisle and the vast majority of it either has no taste, or it tastes like vegetable oil. On the other hand there are some really good low-cal, low-fat frozen entrees that are of superior quality.
But the ratio of diet foods to “regular” foods in any supermarket I’ve ever been in has been like 9.5:1 in favour of the “regular” stuff.
The thing I don’t like about diet food is that they go to great lengths to try to make it taste like its regular counterpart. The problem with this is that they often have to plump it up with chemicals to achieve that. I don’t like the thought of eating low-fat-no-sugar-0 Carbs yogurt and wondering what kind of tumors it might be growing in me.
I have found it very difficult to find a decent selection of ‘full fat’ foods also. Must yogarts have low fat as their ‘norm’, ice cream is ice milk at best, even premimum brands (B&J’s may mix some cream in but when I visited their factory they had at least one milk ‘silo’ and one cream ‘silo’, it may have been 2M to 1C however. You have to look carefully to get real whole milk cheese too.
I personally think, and have for years that we are suppose to eat full fat and the low fat craze is unhealthy, so I hate buying low fat.
And to take this even further afield, the real culprit (in my opinion) isn’t the fats anyway, but the sugar. I avoid aspartame and all other artificial sweeteners, too - I don’t think they’re good for you, and if I want sweet, there’s always fresh fruit.
I personally wish that some of the new “50% less sugar!” products would just be *50% less sweet. Fruit juice doesn’t have to be pumped up with either grape juice concentrate or Splenda until it’s as sweet as 7-Up. Yogurt doesn’t have to be so saturated with sweeteners that you can’t actually taste the yogurt. Cripes, even the new “healthy” varieties of flavored oatmeal are so packed with sugar and artificial sweeteners that they taste like Sugar Smacks.
But apparently I’m the only member of the shopping public who thinks that way—or else we’re all the sort of people who pass up the convenience foods for the big tub of plain yogurt that we have to divide it up into cups ourselves to pack in our lunches, anyway.
I think it’s just you and me, Poddy. I drink club soda sweetened with a tiny bit of fruit juice (unsweetened, of course - sweetened fruit juice is an abomination unto nature), and I have the same rant as you do - everything doesn’t need to be sickly sweet. Allow things to have flavours other than sweet, dammit.
I don’t get cottage cheese. It’s just plain wrong. After 33 years I still can’t tell if it’s supposed to be runny cheese with clumps, thick milk with clumps, or Satan’s seed. I suspect a combination of all 3.
