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No, I personally wouldn't support any curb. Prohibition didn't work too well, did it? Poople will find a way to get their guilty pleasures--whether booze or junk food.
No, I think if there were more government involvement to end the obesity epidemic, I'd vote for spending more money on education on nutrition, starting in kindergarten--and proceeding through life-long education.
Informed consumers can (if they chose to) make intelligent choices--especially when given alternative foods that taste good without the harmful ingredients.
The public awareness campaign about tobacco and smoking did a lot of good to reduce the number of smokers. Maybe the makers of garbage foods should contribute to a PR fund/advertising chest to advertise to consumers, too--about the harm their foods can cause...
The govt. could also remove or reduce corn subsidies (benefits junk food makers who use cheap high fructose corn syrup in their products) and start subsidizing healthful foods such as kale, broccoli, blueberries, other fruits, vegetables and whole grains such as rye...
Think this will ever happen??
It's a complex issue, this obesity problem...and it will take creative and complex solutions to effect change.
No bans on consumers buying anything. If you want to take HFCS/sugar out of public schools, fine, but let's cut out the 'fat' argument when it's clear that fat isn't the problem on its own. It's what fat and what kinds of proteins and carbs it's being served with. Any diabetic knows this.
If there's education to be had, it's in menu design on a austerity budget. Nutritious AND flavorful. However, IMO, that's a fool's errand because people who don't want to be educated simply don't want to be educated.
The whole low-fat/"light" thing is a big agrobusiness scam - Big Pharma and BigAg tell the AMA/FDA what to think and say anyway.
Personally, looking at food threads on C-D alone, assuming that's representative of the US as a whole, it's completely hopeless. The inevitable road will be rich people get to eat real food and everyone else eats Soylent Green sandwiches.
The current agriculture is the only known agriculture capable of feeding the current population of the nation and planet. It is impossible for backyard gardens and organic, free-range, smiley-face agriculture to accomplish the task.
A significant part of the supposed obesity epidemc is entirely phony, resulting from reliance on bad metrics that are in the process of being replaced. Sorry, Charlie...but only good-tasting tuna get to be Starkist, and a 6-foot male is not obese at 221 pounds.
Forty years ago there was not an "obesity epidemic". Fast Food places hardly existed back then. We walked and biked a lot more then too. Processed foods weren't abundant back then either.
And people used lard to fry their food and butter on everything. They drank whole milk and used heavy cream in their coffee. Meat was more prominent on most menus at home. So were gravies. People probably just died of eating these things because in those days they didn't have medical procedures like coronary bypass operations to save them. So you had less obese people around so see.
But it is true that people moved more I supposed although there are a lot of bike riders around these days.
I recently heard a nutritionist saying that exercise is even more important than what we eat although a healty diet is important. The problem is, a healthy diet is kind of difficult to define. One day you will hear eat this, the next day it's no, eat that. There was a guy in the news recently who said he ate McDonald's cheeseburgers every day for years and his cholesterol was just fine. I wouldn't recommend that though.
I don't think there is any one thing that causes any one person's obesity. Banning fast food restaraunts won't solve the problem. Each person with the problem has to find their own solution. They need to see what works and what doesn't work for them. In the process of losing weight, one size does not fit all.
American's need to exercise often, eat less and educate themselves on the merits of nutrition over flavor, it's as simple as that.
Problem is its not that simple, Overweight people tend to have an addiction to food that transcends logic,people will sit on their butts most of the day and feed themselves with the most fattening foods available,foods with high fat,sugar and gluten content.
I'm one of those people who are overweight and lead a sedentary lifestyle have diabetes and wish i could get motivated to lose the 80+lbs thats slowly killing me. I'm sure those who have tried every diet without success know just how tough it is to break the unhealthy lifestyle that leads to obesity and related issues.
I remember the years of trying to shake the nicotine addiction,its been 5 years since my last smoke but looking back on the battle it seemed easy by comparison to giving up a large % of my food intake.
This week its back to the "Fat,Sick and nearly Dead" diet, it certainly gets rid of the lbs problem is keeping the weight off once you end the regime,
The current agriculture is the only known agriculture capable of feeding the current population of the nation and planet. It is impossible for backyard gardens and organic, free-range, smiley-face agriculture to accomplish the task.
A significant part of the supposed obesity epidemc is entirely phony, resulting from reliance on bad metrics that are in the process of being replaced. Sorry, Charlie...but only good-tasting tuna get to be Starkist, and a 6-foot male is not obese at 221 pounds.
So very true! Why is it that back in the '60's a women of average height of around 5'4" was perfectly fine weighing around 120 or so wearing a size 12 is today considered overweight and a size 12 is considered a "plus size."
Sometimes the diet industry would have us believe that for women anything over a size 6 and over 100 pounds is fat. No wonder so many teenage girls have anorexia.
What is overweight depends a lot on body structure, muscle mass and height. Different people have different metabolic rates, age makes a difference. I once knew a woman who actually had to eat to maintain a normal weight. If she skipped a meal she would lose a few pounds. Her brother had the same problem. I say problem because even though people would tell her how lucky she was she didn't think so. The risk of being underweight was not healthy any more than being overweight. Having to make certain she ate more often than she always wanted to keep the weight on was just as troublesome as anyone having to watch what they ate to keep the weight off.
It is simply too simplistic to say this or that will work in the battle for weight loss for everyone. But there are a lot of people out there with a lot of advice as to how everyone can do it just one way and there are a lot of fools willing to spend hundreds of dollars to listen to them.
-Much better education in school. I don't think health or nutrition are really taught at all in a constructive way. If, 3x more teenagers are overweight than 20 years ago, why hasn't the curriculum caught up with this? I think the current model is very outdated, reactive, and isn't necessarily inclusive of different ideas or modes of thought.
I.e, I would expose k-12 kids to western medicine, eastern medicine. How the mind works, mind/body, breathing (i.e. yoga). The problem is everything has gotten so babied and politically correct, these would probably be "controversial". Even when 30% of the kids are overweight! I think we've created a self destruct mechanism in k-12. You can't do anything outside of the norm now, even when your kids might be starved for information or the need to do something different.
I wonder why cigarettes are taxed so high, and they're behind glass counters in convenience stores....but you can buy chips and soda so easily??
How did the corn syrup lobby get to be so big? Why is it so much bigger than healthy foods?
Some people though have voted with their wallet. KFC for example has really lost their influence (at least here in california). Places like panera bread, whole foods, etc have sprung up.
-Part of education (that I don't understand). Europeans for example have a diet of meat and wine, but I don't think they have the obesity epidemic. Similar with asian countries. We've eated ourselves into a hole, I don't think we understand why.
She's still fine today.
But no one is calling THAT woman (or the 6' 220lb man) obese.
Not obese but I was responding to the comment about today's standards of the fashion industry and the general public of the popular perception of appearing overweight. She would be considered plus size today. And in the eyes of many if not most, overweight. Certainly in the eyes of teenage girls, she would be considered downright fat.
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