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Life just seems to be out of control and overly stressful for many people. I think that leads to a lot of people regressing to bad habits, stress eating, etc. When every few years the foods that were proclaimed "very bad for you" are suddenly rebranded as "very good for you" (or vice versa) many people become fed up with even trying.
I am not sure what you say has much to do with the over weight problem in America or anywhere else. Lack exercise, sugar in our foods and buying too many processed foods contribute to a lot of health issues including obesity. I also take these studies with a grain of salt. OK, so salt isn't good for us either.
Remember every year more automatic devised are introduced. this means we burn fewer calories overall. If nothing else think of the number of hours we spend on the computer or texting each day: we burn almost no calories doing either. How many of us are switching to robo vacuums? why push a heave vacuum when you an push a little button and a tine round, flat thing will clean the floors through out your whole house. Doesn't sound like much but ever little thing like this cuts down on the energy we are using
Europeans view food differently. They eat meals and not so much snacking. Food is celebrated as a way to bring people together and they value cooking. And they value fresh ingredients. Plus they walk a lot more.
Also taking time to eat, and eating at the same time every day, and focus on seasonal ingredients. My mother is French and the above is how I was raised. After deviating from this in early adulthood, there were consequences after a couple of decades. Not weight but other health issues. The general consensus from my doctors was that health issues were a natural process of aging. I accepted that for some time, but I'm back now and at 65 have never been healthier. She always focused on the best and freshest ingredients, as do I.
The only tradition that I don't always adhere to is having meals at the same exact time every day. She always stressed the importance of walking, and at 96 she's still going. This doesn't mean that everyone in the world should follow the same traditional diet and lifestyle, but it works for my DNA. I encourage everyone to find their own way.
I've read that many Americans devote too little of their budget to food. It's not so much that they can't afford it, but that they'd rather spend on other things. Traditional Europeans tend to spend a larger percentage of their budgets on food.
What surprises me is that since 2008, there has been a huge surge in the wellness industry and production of high end organic products.
Now I never though these things would be a solution as I saw them more of a money making grab, but still...
How has it gotten worse? In 2008 pretty much everyone was eating fast food/processed food, you'd think with the 'new' food options things would at least plateau, but they've kept growing.
Personally I think people should grow their own food, and buy from farmers markets, but that's not realistic for the majority of people.
Has our food gotten worse, or are people moving around less?
I could buy the latter reasoning but even then people weren't very active in 2008, and that's ignoring the recent Gym rise.
Can someone explain this to me?
Simple explanation: Most people eat too many calories for their level of physical activity and age/gender.
Other variables such as types of foods eaten enter the equation also but ultimately it is a case of consumption exceeding exertion over the long term.
Gym attendance is only one measure of exercise. Manual labor, daily long walking, and other forms of low-bling physical effort get overlooked in some surveys.
Poverty is the same if not worse. Unemployment may be down - but that is because a lot of people are no longer getting unemployment because it ran out. Also many people work more than one job to make ends meet.
Poverty used to mean not having enough food and being thin. Now it means having too much and being fat.
Poverty used to mean not having enough food and being thin. Now it means having too much and being fat.
A subject DH and I have discussed a lot.
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Poverty used to mean not having enough food and being thin. Now it means having too much and being fat.
The cheapest food is the highly processed stuff, if you are looking for convenience. I do think if people could make time to cook they would end up spending less and having more nutritious meals. But the drive thru and dollar menu is very alluring. Especially for those that work more than one job and have a family to feed.
The biggest factor is advances in technology. I'm not just talking about computers and smart phones. All kinds of technology.....washing machines, dishwashers, etc.
Think about it....nobody uses a washboard anymore. Nobody has to fetch a pail of water from the well, get the wood for the stove. Heck, even chop the wood for the stove for that matter. Nobody has to crank their car to start it.
We have slowly evolved into a much more sedentary species. You can spend your hour or two at the gym every day, and you are still getting less exercise than say a farming family in the 1940's.
SS
But even kids are fat now. It's not a lack of chores for them (although kids did used to do daily chores) but lack of playing outside, riding their bikes AND the junk food provided for them. Schools have cut back on recess. But mostly it's the food--it has to be the food. Junk food didn't even used to exist. Soda used to be a treat you'd have at a party or at the beach.
If people aren't going to cook anymore, at least there should be affordable take out meals that are healthy and come in normal sized portions. Too much advertising, pushing junk for food too.
The cheapest food is the highly processed stuff, if you are looking for convenience. I do think if people could make time to cook they would end up spending less and having more nutritious meals. But the drive thru and dollar menu is very alluring. Especially for those that work more than one job and have a family to feed.
Yep, and I totally understand that. It's hard to convince people to take more time and effort to make something that they do not really like as much. Our palates crave the salt, fat and sugar (and the food is engineered to appeal to those receptors).
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You cannot out exercise a bad diet. Diet AND exercise are needed to lose and keep off the weight. Exercise without a calorie deficit will not amount to losing weight. Diet is 90% of the equation.
Refined carb foods is junk food. Don't blame doctors for this epidemic. People in this day and age know what constitutes good and bad foods. They also know that eating huge portions of food is not good idea either. Blaming doctors is just lazy.
To a degree, there is a factor of MOST foods on grocery store shelves containing some form of additional sweetener, or an extender, bleach/dye or processing that has impacted its nutritional value. This is often seen in the popular "brand name" products most heavily advertised. These products as well as their cheaper, store-brand alternatives contain much of the same ingredients, and are equally nutritionally devoid.
The homemade goods that these sweets, snacks, and dishes attempt to emulate are a far cry from what a product looks like that can be stored for months at room temperature and not experience any deterioration in "quality". But we're not in a doomsday scenario where these are the only remaining foods.
We're in a doomsday scenario where the healthy, whole foods are priced astronomically higher than processed foods. Processed food "should" theoretically cost more, since it had to be formed and manipulated into what it is. But that would only be true if there real ingredients going into them that we'd eat in their raw form. But no such things are going into these products. They're cheaper because they are flavor-focused replicas of healthy things, specifically made to "shut kids up" and put them in a sugar coma.
6 oz of organic blackberries should not cost $5.39. An organic zucchini should not cost $2.99 apiece, or $5.99 because it's been machine sliced and sealed in a plastic box for a "ready-to-cook" side dish. Unbelievable.
Food prices are just STUPID high. "Demand" only means there are people out there stupid enough to pay that price - because enough people live on 1/10th acre or less and will get fined by an HOA if they till up their yard to grow their own food.
We just got my MIL back from rehab - she is a hot mess. COPD, small heart attacks and strokes she didn't know about, needs oxygen... it's bad. Not even 74.
She will snap your head off if you try to give her a vegetable, she HATED when I stayed there and cooked. She wants meat and potatoes, and gravy if you please, and why did nobody stock the house with Coke?
I KNOW diet is no promise of health, but good god, give your body a break.
I think the US created a perfect storm to make it easy to go the path to obesity. INE and others have mentioned all the ways it happened.
Indeed. Diet and exercise both matter, and you can only trade off a bit of good in one area for a bit of bad in the other so much! The common refrain of “I worked out for x hours so I deserve to eat half a cake tonight” does not constitute a healthy balance if done too frequently. It is not the same thing as eating another helping of meat and salad because more calories were burned earlier. The cake is junk food, loaded with sugar and fat (and yes, I do like cake, but it is still a form of junk food).
The US—or more accurately, product manufacturers—have been encouraging people to be lazy for many decades. Convenience is heralded as the be-all and end-all. Below, I have jotted down a list of all the little things in our daily lives that used to require more physical effort, however slight. The cumultive and growing effect of all these conveniences not only requires less physical effort, it makes people think that it is abnormal to do things “the old way.”
The list:
* Convenience foods, which would take more than a few pages to list. To take just ONE example: making a main dish of spaghetti and meatballs used to require boiling a pot of water for the pasta and cooking and draining the noodles; plus mixing ground meat(s) with herbs, spices, and perhaps a few bread crumbs; plus hand-shaping the meatballs; plus browning the meatballs and removing from pan; plus making a sauce of tomatoes and cut fresh veggies (or pouring a jar of spaghetti sauce which in itself is a convenience food); then putting the meatballs in the pan to simmer, perhaps with a bit of cooking wine or more herbs. The convenience of spaghetti sauce was already common long ago. Then along came precooked and preseasoned meatballs, either frozen or merely cold-packed but in either case already browned. Then came kits of bagged cooked noodles and bagged meatballs with a package of sauce. Now, I can buy a frozen bag of pasta already cooked with the sauce and meatballs, all merely requiring warming up in a pot. Note that I have not even mentioned canned kiddie spag and meatballs or frozen microwaveable products. Nor have I said a peep abut growing the veggies and meat animals, which is a whole another set of “not convenients”. We have so many ways to get our convenient food!
* Roombas? Vacuum cleaning is already easier than mopping and sweeping.
* Electric toothbrushes.
* Dishwashers.
* Washing machines and dryers. Hand-scrubbing, sudsing, rinsing, and wringing (even with a crank roller) take much more physical effort than dumping clothes in machines and pushing buttons.
* Remote controls for darned near everything. Yeah, I guess it is just too much effort to get off your butt and walk a few feet to the TV or whatever. And the more you live this way, the bigger and more efforty that butt gets.
* Cell phones. Keep it in your pocket and you don’t even have to get up to answer the phone a few feet away!
* Better yet, why bother walking one or two houses over when all communication, even those that require some back-and-forth, can be whipped off in txt msgs? Hey, there’s another example—I did not bother typing “text messages”!
* Transportation could easily take an entire book to show the entire realm of conveniences spanned between walking to work and driving an automatic transmission, electronically-guided vehicle to work. But one little thing I want to mention is that the mere change from taking a public bus or train to driving your own car includes not only the machine-transportation aspect, but also the change from walking whatever distance between your home and the transit stop (and from transit stop to workplace) to instead stepping a few feet into a very close-parked car, perhaps even remotely started with the heater running so you do not expend a few calories saying, “Brrrrr” as it warms up.
* Then there are automatic door openers at stores, work, or even at home. No bodily effort at all!
* Hey, why bother using shampoo and creme rinse when you can avoid the extra steps by using a combination product instead.
There’s more, of course. The point is not to say conveniences are bad per se. The point is that many, many effort-saving products and habits and an overall mindset that physical effort should be avoided have become common, entrenched, taken for granted. IF you stop and think about just one day in your life and how these things would have been done even a mere 30 years ago, it should show that this gradual, growing reduction of physical effort constitutes a major change. Combine that with the gradual, growing increase in processed and/or unhealthful food products frequently consumed, and the trend towards a fatter, less vigorous population should come as NO surprise.
Last edited by pikabike; 05-08-2019 at 11:51 AM..
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