Dude, your own personal experience while you were in college does not constitute “empirical data” that can be extrapolated to “obesity in America.” If you can’t comprehend that, it’s your brain and not your body that is suffering from poor health.
Michael Phelps eats 12,000 calories a day, and he’s as lean as a greyhound. Should we therefore conclude that all Americans should eat 12,000 calories a day and swim for 6 hours? Or would it be less retarded to conclude that, because the average American can never burn as many calories as Michael Phelps does in a day, maybe the best way for most people to keep their weight down is to limit their caloric intake?
You can increase your basal metabolic rate by building more muscle mass, but the amount of extra energy you will burn at rest is far less than most people realize. You can have biceps like a tree trunk, but you’ll still be fat if you eat like a land whale.
And if the average American job today were the average American job of 100 years ago - manual farm labor for twelve hours a day, then the idea of a farm breakfast and high fat, high caloric meals (often farm meals) would be healthy.
One of the things that I think has happened is that our lives got a lot more sedentary post WWII. At the same time, our standard of living made it possible to have “Sunday dinner” every night of the week. For the poor, high caloric meals cheap have historically been critical - because they worked their asses off doing manual labor and needed the calories to sustain that at a small price. When the danger of starvation is real - which it has been in America until about fifty years ago, the important thing is calories - not nutrition.
Our farm policy (and by extension our food policy) still is about getting people calories cheaply. But that isn’t what we need any longer.
Muscle accounts for approximately 45-55% of a man’s weight. The percentage for women is lower.
at 50% the muscle burning power in a single day is approx 1235 calories (with no exercise)
Burn the other 2-700 calories working out. That comes close to 1600 calories.
I haven’t done any research that you burn through the day doing various activities or what the body needs to function during the day, but I can see a 2500 calorie diet being entirely sustainable IF people would learn to stay fit.
Another interesting theory (I believed Michael Pollan wrote about it) is that people who eat unhealthily are never sated because their bodies are starved, nutritionally, and won’t stop eating until they get enough of a certain nutrient. So instead of eating an orange for vitamin C, they’ll have ten glasses of watered down fruit punch (all right, I’m sure that’s an overly simplistic example).
That’s not really fair. Where did I say or anyone say that they had to have a big glob of butter or Smart Balance? I realize that portion size is a huge problem for many people, but some of us are sensible enough to know what a serving size is and stick to it. Just because we’ve substituted something healthier for something terribly unhealthy, we are ignoring portion sizes. If a person is trying to eat healthier, there’s nothing wrong with a multigrain muffin with a serving size (or less) of Smart Balance, so long as they aren’t exceeding caloric requirements, but they are meeting their nutritional needs.
As to the rest of your post, I don’t disagree, but I thought this thread was about how healthy foods are more expensive than less healthy foods, of which I was giving an example as it applies to me. Instead, it’s turned into a processed foods (which are generally less healthy) are more expensive than raw foods (which are generally healthier) argument, which, to me, seems obvious, but less than the whole picture. In fact, some processed foods are healthy to eat, but very expensive. I don’t condone living off of processed foods alone, but for some people, having healthier options in processed foods offer a convenience that serves them well. To be sure, however, you can’t expect in most cases to not pay a premium for convenience.
My beef har, har with food is that industrial farming is turning what used to be healthy, nutritional foods into cheap, nutritionally barren foods and most of us turn a blind eye to the part that consumerism and capitalism plays in that. We want everything available all the time at cheap prices and in visually stunning (even if nutritionally and flavorfully substandard) presentations. My preserves must have HFCS or else it has to be artificially sweetened; whatever happened to plain, old sugar? Even our bread is sweetened with HFCS. Why? Because the government subsidizes it to make it cheaper than sugar. Our meat and dairy is full of hormones and antibiotics and is fed genetically modified grain. Why? Because the government subsidizes it and it’s cheaper to farm in massive quantities. Our veggies are contaminated with E.Coli. Why? Because the contaminated soil is so depleted, it can’t produce the quantity of produce we require without using contaminated fertilizers. High mercury levels in fish; artificially fed farm-raised salmon; the list goes on and on.
The true cost of food is in what our production methods is doing to the environment and our own health.
Exactly. When supermarketing, if you see any Big Food product with a predominately green label*, stay far away from it. The more they claim it’s “healthy”, the less chance that it is. Truly healthy food doesn’t need to scream and yell that it’s healthy. Scam.
*It still cracks me up that “green label” became the universal American signal for bogus “healthy” food at some point in the 1980’s. Some company started using it on their ersatz crap, had some success with it, and the rest were afraid of getting left off the gravy-train that is cheap fillers and chemical pseudo-ingredients masquerading as health-food. Sometimes (usually) corporate hacks can be such unoriginal followers.
I raise pastured chickens for living-birds that are antibiotic and hormone free and raised outside for a majority of their lives.
My poultry is much higher in Omega-3’s because it has access to plants and bugs-an essential part of any chickens diet. The birds don’t live in their own shit and are not overcrowded.
We also process our birds on site to ensure that the meat is clean and safe and to hold down the final costs.
It’s really really labor intensive but the end result is truly different from confinement house chicken.
Is it cheap?
No, we charge $3.50 per pound for a whole bird at the local farmer’s market and we’re about the most economical producers in our area.
However, if you are willing to ‘work’ the bird, you can get at least 3 meals out of a 4 pound chicken.
Or, you can form a buyer’s club, purchase 20 birds at a time, and I will reduce the price to $3.25 per pound and deliver the chicken to you on my weekly rounds.
I also offer ‘defect’ birds at a greatly reduced price-chickens that have lost a wing or have bruised breast or legs or other cosmetic issues that do not affect the quality of the meat.
We can’t lower our prices and maintain the same standards of quality. We just barely make a decent living as it is and every day is a gamble that we can beat the weather and the predators.
Some of our clients have actually suggested that we should raise our prices because they know how hard we work to bring the birds to market but we won’t until we absolutely have to because we want to keep our chicken accessible to everyone.
So no,it’s not always the same companies producing the both the healthy and unhealthy meats.
Really? You don’t think there’s anything unhealthy about avian influenza and it’s potential impact on the human population? It’s no secret that cramming thousands of genetically modified chickens together in a cramped situations exacerbates the spread of disease.
Furthermore, factory farming creates far more animal secretion than the environment can handle. You’d think that all that chicken shit would go into fertilizer, and when it does, there aren’t concerns with antibiotic resistance, but that’s not the case. What doesn’t seep into the environment and create further health problems for all living organisms, including people, goes into animal feed. That’s right, the farmed fish and beef you eat were fed chicken shit. Chicken shit laced with E.Coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter, staphylococci and enterococci.
Well no, but unless your chicken is available at Stop & Shop (or whatever Big Supermarket predominates in your neck of the woods), it’s kind of irrelevant to the discussion at hand. I presume (perhaps incorrectly) that your clients are both knowledgeable enough to seek you out, and affluent enough that the cost is not an issue for them. Nothing wrong with that, good on you. But for someone who DOES shop at the local megamart, the chicken options are pretty much Purdue and store brand, and 80/20 and 90/10 beef mentioned in the OP *are *from the same sources and I’m pretty sure that none of those sources are operations like yours. I wish they were, but they’re just not.
Well, I am at the same Farmer’s market every Saturday and that market is on several bus routes.
And, as I mentioned in my first post, if you put together an order of 20 chickens or more, I’ll deliver them right to your office or house for a discounted price, so I’m not sure how much more I can do to make the birds accessible.
Yes, you have to put a little effort into planning and organizing and contacting me but heh, I have to put a lot of effort into raising the birds so I don’t think I’m asking for much.
Wow.If you believe that there is no qualitative health difference between my chicken and a factory farm bird, I really don’t know what to say except enjoy those antibiotic laden fecal nuggets.
That’s all great, and just to clarify, my first post wasn’t any sort of an accusation. I can’t think of anything you could do to make them more accessible either, nor am I suggesting they should be cheaper. I’m just pointing out that the vast majority of people don’t do their shopping at the Farmer’s Market*, or organize an office chicken delivery.** As mentioned repeatedly in this thread, people go for convenience. And lots of people can barely be persuaded that whole wheat pasta with frozen vegetables is a good “convenience” trade-off for Kraft Dinner, so I don’t see them seeking out their local farmer’s markets. That’s sure as hell not your fault, and I’m not proposing any sort of solution here, because I don’t have one.
*I don’t remember seeing meats of any kind at my local farmer’s markets, and a quick (and completely UNthorough) check of their website seems to confirm that memory. Bummer.
**A phrase which called up a mental image of the WKRP turkey drop. Hee.
