This is about a lot more than just food, even though that’s the OP’s subject. Food is kind of a special case in that humans gotta eat and very few of us have five acres and independence.
Awareness - high awareness, not just vague “look at the nutripanel” inquiry - is both a start and a game plan to spending less money on better food. Doesn’t mean you can’t chow down on a Snickers when you want - but it’s my experience that when people are made aware of the absolute garbage tier of foods they buy, they make a permanent jump in eating “value.” The problem is that too many “don’t eat garbage” viewpoints are tied strongly to others, like organic/natural, vegetarian, odd diets, etc. To me, it’s a simple prospect that people be made aware of what’s really in foods they think they know, without any cluttering terminology, diet bias, shame tactics or ideological BS.
That’s all well and good, but you seem to have been talking about avoiding the stuff the major food manufacturers have “told” us to eat. This is just advice on eating better. Those are two very different questions.
Sorry but I can’t read this without hearing Goldfinger: “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.”
Yes we are individuals with freedoms … and members of a society that has an interest, a self-interest, in the health and productivity of its members, with a lower bar to limit freedoms those who are not yet considered competent to make their own decisions.
Thus we require vaccinations (albeit with exemptions) in order to attend public school. We limit access to some recreational drugs even to adults and others are available only to adults, limiting child access. We require certain food and water safety guidelines be met. Vehicles must meet certain standard for safety as well. Pool slides. Fire codes. And on and on.
If one accepts that the products of the food industrial complex cause significant life long harm to both children and adults, limiting their health and productivity and costing society great amounts in health expenditures, then the same standards of balancing individual freedoms to make bad decisions versus societal interests in protecting its members (especially those too young to make informed decisions themselves) applies.
From another perspective it can be thought of as thinking of our society as being ill and that prevention and treatment can only be effective if applied at that societal level.
Public health programs work. Our programs against tobacco have saved money, lives and quality of life. In China, one in three men will die from tobacco related causes. In the US, that number is much lower.
There can be effective public health programs for obesity. These do not necessarily have to be about taking away choices. Most often, they are about removing barriers to making good choices. Parks, bike lanes, and crossing guards help. Recess, nutrition classes, home ec, quality PE, and whole foods ins schools help. Zoning for walkability and access to fresh foods helps. Often, these investments have already been shown to yield savings down the road.
I’ve said it before, but when I was in China, I was very impressed with how seriously they approached their newfound obesity problem. Every housing development includes a recreation area with cheap, easy to maintain outdoor gym equipment-- these parks are very popular among the elderly. Every education institution encourages students to engage in at least two different physical activities a day. Every neighborhood and street corner has a fruit stand, such that it’s easier to grab an orange than a bag of chips. School dining halls offer mostly veggie stir-fries and other made-from-scratch meals.
It isn’t easy to run to your average grocery store and buy healthy.
Yes, there’s the produce section in the corner, and you can find brown rice and dried beans somewhere. But in general, 95% of grocery store offerings are processed foods made with the same ingredients.
You have the canyon of chips, the canyon of soda, the canyon of crackers, the canyon of cookies…so much of the grocery store is salted, greased up carbs, or sugared greased up carbs. They package it in super clever ways but basically half the grocery store is the same type of product
repackaged a hundred different ways.
It isn’t difficult to shop healthy at the average nonMegamart grocery.
For sake of argument you need to shop every morning for the days food.
We will use my tiny Better Val-U as an example. Walk in pushing the average cart.
1 banana, 1 navel orange, 1 apple
1 head of buttercrunch boston butter lettuce [it is about the size of a large softball or a grapefruit, basically a single serving size]
1 tomato
1 bag of baby carrots
1 small tub hummus
1 small red onion
1 basket of button mushrooms [forgive me if i stick these in, i am allergic but lots of people like shrooms and they are a decent part of any diet.]]
1 red bell pepper.
1 idaho baking potato
1 4-6 oz portion of steak oatmeal cup
Obviously oatmeal for breakfast with the orange
midmorning break - 6 or 7 of the baby carrots with hummus to dip into
lunch a salad of the boston butter lettuce with 2 or 3 of the mushrooms chopped, part of the red bell pepper chopped, a quarter of the red onion chopped, one or 2 of the carrots chopped and the tomato chopped [it assumes that you keep a bottle of salad dressing lurking in your fridge, though it is possible to buy Kens brand single serve packets of salad dressing from places like BJs and Costco]
midafternoon snack the apple
supper - baked potato, grilled/broiled/fried steak, carrots prepared by slicing into discs and simmering in water until tender, the balance of the mushrooms, the pepper and the onion sauteed into a relish to top the steak and potato with [or not, some people don’t like stuff like that, and you could turn them into an impromptu salad if you bought more lettuce, or changed to a larger or different lettuce like 2 heads of romaine or a head of iceberg]
bedtime snack the banana
You get all your portions of fruit and veggie, your carbs are in the form of a baked potato and vegetables with a moderate amount of oatmeal and protein in the form of the steak and hummus. All the meals are reasonable for middle America, reasonably healthy and other than the oatmeal, hummus and salad dressing, not a processed food yet you could go for a natural hummus with minimal crap, make your own dressing to minimize chemicals, and make oatmeal from scratch and add your own sweetening and flavorings.
I agree aruvgan, it can be done. But I’m not sure how easy I think it. As much as I know I should eat healthy foods, my body craves chips, candy … And the food manufacturers know that well. My approach is to try to keep those to infrequent treats.
But what do you suggest for people who lack the mindset to try to resist the marketing? Or those who live in areas where fresh fruit and veggies are hard to find?
I think one idea would be more explicit packaging. Make more explicit how much sugar has been added - say - to Yoplait yogurt. Yeah, I know it would be difficult.
Maybe I didn’t express myself clearly. As I said, food is a special case and it’s somewhat off my main avenues.
By the above, I did not mean tepid “eat better” and nutrition education efforts; I meant an active effort to counter the entire sweep of crap-food perceptions that the processed food industry has hammered into us. Nutripanels and nutrition awareness are all well and good, but the information is presented in such a coy, limited, shell-game manner that it’s lost (as it’s supposed to be) in the avalanche of marketing bullshit. Nutrition panels, fought at every step, contain only a reduction of meaningful information, so compressed and stratified that they may as well just give the chemical analysis of the box’s aggregate contents (and include the cardboard).
I propose a full-out counterprop strategy that calls the food industry on the disparity between their marketing, packaging and presentation efforts and the feeble support and content of “consumer nutrition” labeling. That’s the kind of awareness we need - not yet more food-pyramid or calorie-counting or sugar-bad bleating.
That’s ridiculously overstated. Crackers, cookies, chips and soda make up 2 to 2.5 aisles in a modern grocery store. The produce section isn’t “in the corner”, it’s the single largest section of the store, and it isn’t even close. Then you have huge sections of frozen vegetables, fresh meat, long sections of dairy, eggs, and cheese. You also have large sections of dried beans and rice, pasta, cereal (which is hit or miss) and canned vegetables, beans and tomatoes.
There’s plenty of crap in a modern grocery store, but there is also a huge amount of perfectly healthy food as well. Your post was an exaggeration bordering on total fiction.
True, but there’s still considerable truth in the claim that the (much higher profit) crap is overwhelmingly presented for sales over, say, lettuce.
One thing that runs through all these discussions is the cadre of people who assure us that they’re too smart to fall for food marketing, and say or imply that anyone who does is just too stupid to be worth considering. I reject the validity of both claims. Fine, fine, fine, YOU are too smart to ever buy a crap food item unawares - but you are in a vanishingly small minority among reasonably intelligent, reasonably educated people who don’t know how to cook anything more complicated than jar-sauce spaghetti; these folks might “know” that there is bad food, but I’d bet they’d egregiously fail any basic shelf test on nutrition and food quality.
Time to fight back and kick the crap-purveyors right in their sugar, salt and fat-stuffed balls. Yes, they can sell it… time to work at ensuring people won’t buy it.
Just a couple of thing from the book SSF:
If you question conflating big food with tobacco, realize that RJ Reynolds owns Nabisco, and Philip Morris owns General Foods and Kraft.
Re: spaghetti sauce, the 2d ingredient in Prego after tomatoes is sugar, with 2 tsp in 1/2 cup.
I think better labelling, as was done with cigarettes, would be a good start.
[That is a Q not a G in my name =)]
To repeat my Diabetic Nutritionist [who has a degree to back it up] there is nothing wrong with adding in one of the 100 cal packs of junk food as one of the 3 snacks allowed during the day, as long as the 3 main meals are of good quality. There is nothing inherently bad with fat or sugar even for diabetics - it is in the amount of fat and sugar in comparison to the rest of your diet.
She even figured in a random 185 calories per day wildcard, I could even get out a bag of sugar and eat pure sugar for that 185 cal if I really wanted to, or chow down a hunk of lard - as long as the rest of my diet was balanced. [where is that yuckky smiley now?]
In an ideal republic, we could have a powerful government that created and implemented good policies regarding food. But in the real world, that seems impossible. I can scarcely name a single set of good government policies that have been created in my lifetime. The government may have accomplished a few small, good things, but whenever it tries its hand at a sweeping set of regulations for a major industry, something bad happens. I do not believe that the government we currently have is capable of creating good policies. I think the best that a pragmatic person can hope for is to limit the harm of bad policies, and the best way to do that is to limit the scope of government.
Several people in this thread have already mentioned ways in which government subsidies and tariffs have made our food unhealthy. If we want Americans to eat healthier, we should start by axing every penny of direct subsidies to agriculture and ever protective tariff. The government should stop artificially limiting supplies of fruit. All of this would actually produce positive effects on people’s health, and it might even cut that national deficit we keep hearing about too.
I dunno. We libertarians are not our brother’s keepers.
“Poor” has nothing to do with it. Healthy eating is not rocket science, and anyone with a HS education can educate himself. No HS education? Well, that can be had for free by anyone in the US, so “personal responsibility”.
Given however that we are not in Liberteria, do you see any reason to analyze balance of individual freedoms not make poor decisions against the state’s interest in protecting the health and productivity of its citizens (especially those too young to be considered competent to make their own decisions) by standards different than used for issues like food, water, and product safety guidelines, or childhood immunization compliance, or recreational drug use? (Accepting that a hard libertarian would prefer no regulation for any of those items and would prefer the state have no interest in assuring the health and productivity of its citizens, leaving all choices to contracts between educated consumers.)