But why do we eat too much of the wrong food?
It starts in childhood with sugary cereals, sugary drinks, and sugary snacks, many of which are consumed in between meals. Kids have easy and constant access to bad food choices, which reinforces bad habits over time. It shapes the way we think about food, as do our portion sizes and food items on the menu at restaurants.
I think the way we think about food is also reflected in how different cultures approach dining. In Asian cultures, for instance, people share their food items with each other, whereas in the US, we eat our own individualized meals. I remember going to izakayas in Japan with my Japanese coworkers and we’d all just pitch and and pay for small trays or plates of items we could share. It wasn’t like “This is mine, and that’s yours.” By itself, it seems hardly significant I realize, but I think it does somehow influence in subtle ways how we think about our meals.
As for cleaning your plate, if you go to China - or even Japan for that matter - you will find that people there usually do clean their plates. IME, they’re much more likely to clean their plates there than we are here, but plate cleaning is done for perhaps different reasons. My impression - and I could be wrong - is that when Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Thais clean their plate, it’s out of an appreciation for food. The idea is that you get the food you need and not much more than that, and you eat it up and don’t waste it. By contrast, I find that people here tend to find food cheap, disposable, and abundant. I think Americans approach eating with that in mind. There’s constant access to food, much of it unhealthy. Food culture here is less ritualized. People eat on the go, wherever and whenever they want. My guess is that in cultures where snacking between meals is frowned on and where you consistently eat the same quantity of food 2 or 3 times a day, that’s probably a healthier approach to eating.
It’s because we’re eating all the damn time. Back fifty years ago we ate 3 times a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now people eat 5, 6, 7 times a day. There’s a mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack. You can’t buy gasoline without someone trying to sell you a Slurpee or a bag of chips. People have a snack in the evening watching television.
Every time you eat it raises your insulin level. Insulin is a fat storage hormone. As long as insulin is present; your body can not take fat out of storage and metabolize it for energy, all it can do is store more fat.
If you want to lose weight, try not eating so often. Skip a meal once in a while, it won’t kill you. Our bodies evolved to deal with food scarcity and have compensatory mechanisms to handle the occasional fast. If you have medical issues you may need to adjust medications before trying it, but healthy people can certainly handle fasts up to a week or ten days without any problems.
Because in America the plate has a much larger portion. The why means that in America the kids are getting twice the calories on their plates.
So why are Americans eating all the time, but people in other countries aren’t?
We watch a LOT more TV:
and get out and exercise less.
This says Americans watch 270 minutes of TV a day compared to 262 minutes for the Japanese. That’s only a 3% difference, hardly significant.
True, Japan also watches a lot of TV.
Our food producers, sellers, and lobbyists including the United States Department of Agriculture are better at selling food than anyone else in the world.
I agree. Also, the few times I’ve been to japan, I don’t recall ever eating bread, cheese, or milk, or potatoes from what I remember.
That is sarcasm, right? Just making sure…
Not at all. I don’t remember eating those foods, it was a few years ago though
I’m surprised, because many of my colleagues (who occasionally travel to Japan for business) rave about how good Japanese bakeries are. Lots of izakaya food have potatoes and cheese in them. They even have potato pizza (usually with a mayonnaise based sauce) at mainstream pizza chains. As for milk, I got a bottle every day as part of my school lunch in elementary school in Japan.
I also remember staying at some institutional dormitories (remote observatories and similar facilities) where the breakfast consisted of a thick slice of bread (shokupan), packet of cheese and a carton of milk.
I travelled there for business 3 times for only a week at a time. My japanese travell companions didn’t want me to eat American food they said. Which was fine for me. I did stay in hotels and we usually did have a western style breakfast with the best scrambled eggs I’ve ever ate.
But for lunch we would get a box of different dishes. Seems like it was, rice, maybe a salad, miso soup i think it was called, tempura seems like something I remember, and fish. I really liked all the sauces and seasonings, very flavorful.
Then for dinner, I remember alot of noodles, soup, fish, meats on a stick, goyza i think its called. All very high quality. We’d usually eat at a bbq 1 or twice. I don’t remember the names of all the dishes anymore.
IME, most people pay at the pump. They’re not selling chips out there, are they?
My experience has been that dessert sizes are quite different. I grew up in the sugar generation snarfing down all sorts of Hostess products. Desserts here tend to be less sweet and in smaller sizes.
My mother always uses things such as HamburgerHelper when cooking. I’ve found the US to be more convenient that way for cooking, where Japanese and Taiwanese cooking tends to be more from scratch. I know Americans who also cook using all basic ingredients, but I wonder if that contributes overall. I don’t know enough about how often the average American family cooks and what ingredients they use.
Now you are arguing against yourself. Previously the key point was the reason why children were told to clean their plates, now it’s the boring old portion size after all and not a difference in the specifics of the guilt trips.
I’m not sure how much can be generalized from that particular graph. The article itself wasn’t linked and I’m not convinced that looking at elementary and junior high school kids reflects the activities of adults.
I’ve been living in a small city in Taiwan which only has a minimal number of busses, and the vast majority of adults use private vehicles, which matched my experience in Japan.
Not all meals are shared, but certainly many are. Our home meals are served with the plates of food in the center and each person has their own bowl of rice.
As an aside, People transfer small amounts of food to their rice bowl then it that with the rice. When eating out, Japanese will use the handle end of their chopsticks for the transfer but tend to just grab with the business end when eating at home.
You know, I really don’t know about that. It seems to be an over idealized view of Asian societies, but that could be a difference in what you mean by the word “appreciate.”
YMMV
It may not, but obesity levels among children do impact obesity levels among adults: it’s much harder for obese children to become and remain non-obese as adults. So kids with healthy eating habits who walk to school are building up resistance to future obesity, so to speak.
Since someone mentioned desserts - in my travels in places like Egypt, the Middle East, India, Tanzania - I note that what passes for desserts or treats in those countries is nowhere near as sweet as American fare. Typically traditional dessert concoctions seem to use some honey rather that cloyingly sweet dense sugar. Plus, serving sizes are still small. A treat in those countries is haf the size of a normal US candy bar.
And I’ll add that to the list of things I read in “Case Against Sugar” - that fat is not that big a deal for weight gain, unless combined with a lot of sugar. Italian cuisine with olive oil, or similar dishes in the far east - no big deal, unless sugar is added.
Also noted - when I went on vacation to Dubai, we stayed at a hotel that thoughtfully provided a scale. We spent a week there, walking all over. (The fancy malls, for example, might be half a kilometer or more walking through air conditioned walkways to get from the Metro. We walked along the beach. For food, we ate a lot less than at home - we split a domnair for luch, we split a club from room service or a quarter pounder (sorry, Royale) because we have no idea what food there is and we are not foodies… We drank diet soda or water, just like back home. Net result, I was losing almost a kilo a day between less food and constant walking - I started at about 122.9kg on Monday and left on Friday weighing 118.4kg. Another thing I thought about - no nibbles. We have so much junk around the house, I find I am constantly nibbling. (Similar experience in Italy 15 years before - after 2 weeks of mostly walking around cities in Italy, eating sparingly, I bought a nice leather jacket in Florence. The next year I went to put it on and I was too big. I did not realized I’d lost significant weight on vacation)
One item I have also read about overweight people is they underestimate how much they eat - including “snacks”. I know I certainly do. Plus disrupting my routine and getting me away from familiar food sources helped a lot.
Im familiar with that concept, but I’m specifically addressing the question about activity levels of people who live in areas with convenient mass transportation and those who live in areas without.
I would disagree. First, all French people going to the USA are struck by the size of orders served. So, it’s clear that there’s a big difference.
Second, in fact, people do tend to eat what they’re served. When I get a really small dish in a restaurant, I might think that there’s not enough on the plate, but I don’t typically order a second serving. And similarly, I tend to eat whatever is in the plate, even if I’m not really hungry anymore. So, I, and I guess most other people too, will eat more if they’re served larger portions.
And also, I would assume that it influences what you see as a normal portion. I assume that people living in a country were portions are typically very large will have a tendency to prepare equally large portions when cooking for themselves and their family, because that will be perceived as the norm (and give larger sodas, larger desserts and ice-creams etc… to children if that’s what is usually served in eateries).