In the words of Al in the “Home Improvement” show, “I don’t think so Tim”. 
adam yax wrote:
I’m sure Lib was being sarcastic. 
My local PBS affiliate (KQED) recently re-ran an episode of Scientific American Frontiers about diet and health. One segment described a study in which kids were made to watch MORE TV or sit in front of the computer/video game console more, and then the same kids were made to watch LESS TV and sit in front of the computer/video game console less. During both phases, their eating habits and weight were closely monitored. During the watch-less-TV half of the experiment, the kids tended to fill their newfound free time with physically active activities, like bike riding or playing in the yard. (Some of this extra time was also filled with sedentary activities like reading and playing with dolls, of course.) During the watch-more-TV half of the experiment, the kids tended to eat more snacks, with higher caloric contents, when they sat in front of the TV or computer. The implication was that sedentary behavior carried with it a double-whammy, because ironically one tends to eat more when one is less active.
Another conjecture, not addressed by this experiment, was that sedentary, snack-chompin’ kids tended to turn into sedentary, snack-chompin’ adults. So the way to defeat obesity in America is to, um, limit your kids’ TV/computer time. Or something.
Generalising somewhat on the basis of (extensive) observation of tourists and visitors, but basically, you lot seem to eat so much. When I was a student our halls of residence wee let out in the holidays for overseas visitors, and there was a brief overlap period where we ate in the same canteen as they did. It was standard to allow triple (not double but triple) portions of what we were eating for American visitors, and even then they often complained that it wasn’t enough. Less food = less fat. Not difficult.
As a former NYCer I can testify that life there does involve a lot of walking, and climbing up and down stairs, and running across the street ahead of all that oncoming traffic.
But I’ve still wondered how suburbanites, who now make up the majority of the country, manage to get fat. I mean, if you garden, well, that’s hard work, if you’re doing it properly. If you’ve got children, (especially if they’re under 10) they should certainly keep you active. If you’ve got a dog, walking and playing with it should provide some exercise.
There are days, at the end of a day of gardening or playing with my son, (whose time on the computer and in front of the TV we limit, if by no other means than bothering him to death) or even just hitting balls at the golf range, that I wonder how people manage to put on weight. Normal folks, that is, not people with medical problems.
I think what people are missing in this equation is that health food is considerably more expensive than junk food.
Produce is not cheap, so if you are on a fixed budget or limited income, there goes being able to afford apples at $2.00 a pound(which is 4 apples approx).
A value meal at McDonald’s runs around $4.00 to $5.00. That is cheaper that buying buns, meat, and the accesories to make hamburgers at home.
While there are heavy people who have money, I’d be willing to bet that the majority of people who are heavy are poorer, can’t afford health food, and pay for it by gaining weight.
Multiple reasons.
In general, calories are cheaper than they have been for most of human history. Couple that with exercise being far more expensive than it has been for most of human history.
“Cost” meaning both money, and opportunity cost in time. Take the average bloke growing a gut. He drives to work. At work, he sits at his cube. He drives to lunch, where portions are huge. He drives back to work, then drives home at the close of the workday.
Not many jobs involve exercising anymore. In effect, people no longer get paid to exercise–in order to do so, they don’t necessarily have to give up money, but they do have to give up opportunity cost–they’re paying to exercise out of their own free time. Couple that with corporate America’s insane love affair with overlong work weeks and little vacation time, and there’s not all that much free time. And there tends to be lots of options as to what to do with that free time.
So it’s not so much laziness as a new thing–people have always pretty much been lazy. It’s simply that greater physical exertion and fewer calories came as part of the natural fabric of life to all us lazy folks before–and now, the opposite is true.
Omigawd where do you shop!?
I do all the shopping in my family, and I buy lots of produce because it is cheap! Apples go for 59 to 79 cents a pound, depending on how exotic it is.
It is, however, less accessible than junk food. Walk into a 7/11 and you see aisles of candy. I’ve never spotted so much as a single banana in any dep. Even in supermarkets the counters next to the cash register are covered with chocolate bars.
But I don’t think you need health food to stay thin. You just need to move more, or eat less.
But that’s anathema to the whole American experience. As a person who only visits the U.S. as a tourist, I’m always stunned by the sheer amount of grub thrown on my plate when I’m in a restaurant. You guys eat like horses… when you move like snails.
Hey, don’t go dissin’ the candy bars, pal. Although I’m more fond of the Doritos and Donettes. Then again, the biggest reason I go into 7-11 is 'cuz you can buy an 8-gallon cup of soda for about thirteen cents…
Hey, in some countries, that analogy doesn’t exist… they actually eat their horses and snails.
Here, you’re not considered a true American unless you eat three pounds of raw red meat a day!!!
-SPOOFE “A true American only needs one finger” Bo Diddly, with special thanks to the inspiration granted by Dennis Leary
A fine book as written on this subject. See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140261443/o/qid=988971819/sr=8-1/ref=aps_sr_b_1_1/107-6712408-0212527
The Fat of the Land : Our Health Crisis and How Overweight Americans Can Help Themselves by Michael Fumento, JoAnn E. Manson
Synopsis:
In this thinking person’s guide to weight loss, Fumento exposes the diet industry for what it is, explodes the myths of genetics and low metabolism, and dismisses the low-fat-food fib, showing how “lite” is loaded with unwanted calories and “non-fat” makes us fatter.
A Burger King Sausage Biscuit has something like 900 calories and 30 grams of fat. That would make you fat. McDonald’s food isn’t necessarily that bad if hold the fries and prefer Filet-O-Fish’s and hamburgers to Big Macs and fries.
Recent studies show that one of the biggest effects on calorie intake in kids is the fact that, compared to the past, they get a much higher percentage of their total calories from snacks between meals. These certainly tend to be less healthy foods; often highly processed fast food or frozen pizza pockets.
Of course, activity levels ain’t up. Not like the diabetes epidemic we’re seeing, anyway.
I agree with Barbarian…this seems just silly to me.
Buy the fixins’ for hamburgers (ground chuck @ less than $2 a pound, a package of rolls for $2-3, I assume you keep mayo and ketchup and mustard and pickles and onions and salt and pepper around as a matter of course, right?), and you eat for several meals. Buy a McDonald’s “burger” and you eat once.
Buying a piece of lean meat – flank steak, pork tenderloin – isn’t more expensive than buying a fatty steak or chops. Buy vegetables in season – skip the November asparagus and the February zucchini – and you’re paying bottom dollar for healthy greens.
My two cents about the diff between European-style eating and American: Euros sit down to at least two meals a day as a family group (according to the folklore, anyway), eat until they’re full, then stop and do the dishes. Americans grab food on the run, “graze,” and often a family will eat at several different times, putting a heavy strain on the ol’ microwave. And they ain’t nuking healthy greens in there, either.
Just not lately.
The key to all this is realizing that we live in a period of human history that is unique in that we have a huge population of several generations of individuals who have lived complete lifetimes without facing serious hunger.
We can go on and on about the modern evils of junk food, huckstering, desk jobs, La-Z-Boys and household appliances, but the fact is: we are descended from many generations of people who found that it behooved them to eat a bit more than they needed, if they could. Natural selection made them do it.
Our ancestors faced famines, floods, crop failures, long winters, wars, sieges and all kinds of nasty stuff that affected their food supply. And illnesses abounded: the first thing that happens when you get sick is weight loss.
Only when people start realizing that it is NORMAL and BENEFICIAL to gain weight, in the context of human history as a whole, can we begin to understand the problem. (It’s compounded, of course, by the fact that even when the food supply was stable, our ancestors had to work harder. When was the last time the population of a developed country had to chop wood and haul water just to get breakfast on the table? So it was normal and beneficial to take a break every chance you got, too.)
Okay, it’s not beneficial NOW, that’s the problem. We definitely need a solution, but it will have to be based on the fact that overweight people are not necessarily morally bereft, lazy, gluttonous pigs. They’re merely doing something that kept their forbears alive and healthy. We must use that fact not as an excuse, of course, but an explanation.
A big “me too!” You can throw a yankee pot roast together for $15.00 that will last you the whole week. That’s meat & veggies with no (added) fat for $3.00 a day. And don’t look at me like I’m some super chef- no special cooking skills are required for this. If you know how to operate a knife, follow a recipe and cook with fire then you’re set.
They 7-11s here have apples & bananas on the counter, but they’re exotic designer items worth $1.59 each. Maybe that’s what Hastur meant about healthy food being pricey.
This is actually part of the problem, according to an overweight friend of mine with three kids. She is in constant motion (in her minivan- not on her feet) going from day care to soccer practice to nursery school to pep rallies (whatever those are) and says that her meals often have to be fast & convenient. That means lots of pit stops to 7-11s and MacDonalds.
A question for the internationally savvy dopers: I’ve heard from a few of my friends who came from other lands. Often it seems that the norm in the rest of the world is to eat the biggest, heaviest meal of the day at lunch time (noonish) and then a light snack (maybe a small sandwich or salad) at the dinner hour. This makes sense to me- jack up your blood sugar early in the day so that the rest of the day’s activities can burn it off. If you eat a big meal at 6:30 or 7:00 in the evening, most of it probably goes into storage rather than into the furnace.
As a general rule, would it be “healthier” or more efficient to eat the biggest mean early in the day, and less as it gets closer to bedtime?
Ditto other who have said that healthy food is not expensive. I hear this argument over and over again in these types of threads, but I’ve never heard anyone put forth convincing arguments. It’s just put forth with an “everyone knows…” attitude. Healthy food in season, grown locally, is the cheapest type of food there is.
And heck, if you can’t find a place where you can buy a ten-pound sack of gourmet white rice for under five bucks, send me your money and I’ll ship some to you.
And if you’re sick of burgers, last night I picked up a big old portobello mushroom (66 cents), which I sauteed with a half tablespoon for canola oil ($6 for a gallon), slapped it on some bread ($2 a loaf) with some champagne mustard ($5 an ounce – OK, OK :)), tomato (99 cents a pound) and paired it with a can of sweet corn (49 cents) and a sliced avocado (99 cents). It may not be the healthiest dinner, but it’s not as bad as McDonalds, uses lots of fresh veggies, and was dirt cheap.
So, before spouting nonsense about good food being only for the rich, can you put forth some decent cites?
I’ve lived on both sides of the “healthy food” battle.
Right now I eat very healthy home cooked food. It is very economical for me to do so.
But that wasn’t always the case. If you don’t cook on a daily basis, cooking can be nearly prohibitably expensive.
One problem is that of an unstocked kitchen. If you don’t have oil, spices, condiments and other “basic” items laying around, you have to buy those as you cook. Having to buy a bottle of olive oil and a bottle of basil, for example, turns a five dollar pasta meal into a twenty dollar pasta meal. It takes a while to build up a decent pantry.
And if you don’t have a well stocked pantry, there is no such things as “throwing something together” for dinner. Every time you want to cook, you have to go to the store and buy every single item in the recipe. It all must be well planned.
And if you lifestyle is, as many people’s are, busy and hectic, you never really know when you are going to be home to eat. If you try to buy groceries for the week, there is a good chance that you won’t end up being home and they will all spoil, wasteing money.
This is even worse if you are a single person, and there is no one else to eat what you don’t. It is hard to cook for just one person. A lot of food ends up going to waste. Try going from shopping for one person to shopping for two. You might be surprised that you food bill doesn’t go up that much at all. It is just easier to shop (and cook) for multiple people.
I’ve been there. It’s a cycle, and it’s one that is hard to get out of without a complete lifestyle change.
Ukulele Ike wrote:
Yeah, but then you’d have to eat vegetables! Ew, yuck! Bleah!!
– tracer, vegephobe and proud of it
Eat at McDonalds!
As mentioned above, fast food such as McDonald’s is very unhealthy, especially if you go for the Big Mac with super-size fries and a Coke. However, there is no problem with eating fast food as long as you only do so occasionally. And frankly, I don’t know how people can afford to eat at McDonald’s so often, particularly since those who dine there often usually are in a lower socioeconomic bracket.
Sorry, I don’t have a cite for 5% statistic, I heard it on a local radio station as a “quiz” question with a prize for the first person to call in with the correct answer.
Maybe it also has something to do with never eating breakfast? When talking among my morning class, we all realised that none of us ate breakfast.
Because you eat too much
Sounds OK to me, except maybe for the avacado (I don’t like 'em and they are kinda fatty anyway), but good luck getting my kids to eat it. But I agree that nutritious home cooked meals are less expensive than fast food anytime. The pot roast dinner I make on Sundays is still less expensive than taking the whole family to McDonald’s. (I’m talking eye round here too, not a cheap rump roast. Plus there are usually enough leftovers for another meal.) Maybe not as low-cal as a mushroom sandwich, but far better than McDonald’s.
We all know that fast food is higher in calories than is healthy to eat on a regular basis, and on an individual level may contribute to obesity. But the debate over McDonald’s being the root cause of population wide increases in obesity is pointless unless somebody can show that there has been a per capita increase in consumption of fast food. Otherwise the weight problem would have begun showing up a couple three decades ago.