My daughter is in 3rd grade (in Greece) and she is the only kid in her class getting packaged food everyday with her without any money in her pocket. All the other kids have money, which use regularly to buy potato chips, beverages, sweets, etc from the school's shop.
Also, from what I hear from other parents, other kids regularly eat out, with the Greek souvlaki being the main food they get (which comes with fried potatos and pita), burgers and pizza.
Parents don't want to face their kids when the kids whine all the time, and in order to shut them up, they buy whatever the kids want.
The above, coupled with lack of physical activity due to various reasons, creates the obesity epidemic for kids, at least in my country.
Same thing in Cyprus here. My daughter is in 3rd grade and nearly all Cypriot kids in the class are fat. While Cypriot ones are of course, a minority these days in Cyprus schools.
Most seem to be Russians, Chinese and the like? Even Cypriots kids themselves are whole lot whiter-skinned now, due to a lot of British, then Russian and other Eastern European wives brought in over last couple generations.
I think it has to do with how food quality keeps hitting new lows. We really don't need sheep hair and 5 types of artificial sugars in our foods. We don't need everything bulked up with hydrolyzed soy bean. We really don't need purple plastic gel "berries" in our breakfast. Etc. Surely we can find a way to get foods from the farms to our tables fast enough that they don't have to be picked before they develop full nutritional profiles.
Most of all, that is to say we really don't need 80% of our diets to be empty calories and sugars.
Of course, there is the problem of sedentary living. I can't believe how lazy kids are these days - they don't even go for aimless bike rides anymore, because chatting online and playing 5-hour video game marathons is way more fun than real life apparently. But I'll leave that for someone else to cover.
Let's just say our culture is feeding it, and it takes willful blindness to be at all surprised.
I think the sedentary part is far more important. I grew up in the 1970s in the US, and if anything, we ate worse than we do now with our current concern with calories and nutrition -- we had fast food a couple of times a week, drank soda daily, and ate those awful sugary cereals like Lucky Charms. And yet we didn't (on average) get fat the way kids do today. We burned off those excess calories running around outside and riding bikes.
Look for the word lanolin in your ingredient lists. It's basically boiled down sheep hair. It's a source of vitamin D, but mainly it's used to make things really crispy (when fried) or shiny and slippery (when straight up).
You get vitamin D from a whole lot of other things you eat (it's not rare), and it takes some laboratory wizardry to derive the vitamin D3 from it (versus simply eating normal food to get it...) so nobody is adding lanolin to your food for it's wholesome goodness. It's literally only there for the texture. That's why its in your shampoo, chewing gum, leather polish and french fries, amongst a whole lot of other foods you eat.
Yeah and lanolin would have been of use for cooking for millennia even if it wasn't appetizing just from sheer calories and survival. That fits the pattern of PETA style vegan fanatic "too important for the truth" propaganda. Like claims that sheep are skinned for their wool.
How many people actually believe body positivism deep down? For example, how many people would see zero difference between, all things being equal, dating a thin person and a morbidly obese person?
I'm sure they are out there but I would guess it's very rare compared to the number of people that are body positive in words but not in actions.
I suspect that body positivism wouldn't have that big an effect because most people don't actually believe in it.
My biases say yes but my brain says no. I think it's simply a function of a worsening economic situation incentivizing the consumption of poor quality food that saves people time, money, or both. Also sedentary lifestyles make a lot of heavy foods appetizing that makes you want to puke while exercising.
I ate very unhealthy and was teased quite a bit for it yet never kicked the habit. Once I started receiving more disposible income than I knew what to do with, it became a lot easier to exercise, I could buy whatever food I wanted, and it sort of spun people's heads how quickly my diet changed. People keep making fun of me for having an unhealthy diet just because of inertia even though I'm eating healthier than them.
I really see body positivism as being more caused by the obesity epidemic than the inverse. As well as the rise of social media sort of spiking body-shaming and anti-body-shaming sentiments. Not just in regards to weight but also things like height.
I blame processed foods and all the additional additives and ingredients. Foods have dozens of ingredients now. Simpler foods are better for people. Count ingredients AND calories. Plastic packaging, nonstick chemicals, and antibiotics are also to blame. Plastic and nonstick chemicals change your hormones. Antibiotics kill gut bacteria and make your digestive system absorb more energy. But of course, all of these things are making the few rich at the expense and health of the many. I think sugar and sedentary lifestyles also contribute, but to a lesser extent, and are jut easy scapegoats.
There was an article by The Atlantic that covered this a few years ago. I linked it in a previous comment somewhere, but can’t find it at the moment. Basically, there was a study that controlled for exercise and calories intake and showed even adjusting for that, people weigh 10% more than in the 1980s and 20% more than the 1950s. So exercise and calories aren’t the entire cause.
How does cheap food cause obesity? You gain weight if you eat more calories than you burn, if you are gaining weight from cheap food it just means you are eating too much of it.
And regardless I'm pretty sure foods like rice and potatoes are much cheaper than fast food, and are healthy. They are more expensive in terms of the time it takes to prepare them though.
“More expensive in the time it takes to prepare” is more expensive for large numbers of working class families, and it’s often a worse kind of expensive than a strictly monetary difference.
Sure but couldn't a person just serve smaller portions? Like if your kid is getting fat just take what your normally serve him and throw part of it in the trash (or refrigerator). If he's still getting fat take a bigger part from it next week and so on. I don't understand how this technique could elude anyone rich or poor.
And leave a child to suffer from the many thoroughly documented problems of obesity?
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Your proposal is that you should keep stuffing a fat kid with unhealthy food because he wants more? Plenty of poor people living in food deserts manage to raise kids of a healthy weight.
I can’t imagine the astounding disconnect it would take for someone to post a comment like that.
I'm limited to empty calories because of money and digestion/insulin-spiking reasons. Because the latter is hard, I went keto again since yesterday, and literally starve my body into accepting ketogenesis and glucogenesis as the primary energy pathways for the brain cells.
The hard part is a near total shunning of (metabolically useful) carbohydrates. This is however rewarded by a near total lack of importance regarding meal timing. Aminoacids and electrolytes are the only macronutrients I have to balance needs with intake on a timescale of less than a week. After that there are vitamins, and calories in the shape of triglycerides only need to balance enough to prevent structural fat from being fed to brain and muscles and to prevent irreversible tissue stretching from gaining weight too fast (and practically also to ensure jeans etc. fit properly).
>you do realize that the body feels satiated not by calories but by quantity?
Not really. It's common sense that your body can tell the difference between a pound of boiled cabbage and a pound of steak. You're satiated when you have all the nutrients you need - calories, yes, but also fats and other essentials. If the food you eat is deficient in some nutrients, you might eat more of it to compensate.
Anecdotally, if I make a vegetarian chili, and forget to fortify it with some form of fat, I can eat two whole plates of it and feel bloated but unsatisfied.
A rice cooker at goodwill is maybe $10.00. A slow cooker let’s say another $10.00. Throw another 20 at a bag of rice and dried beans then you have a minimal effort super cheap “won’t make you fat” meal.
I think its that people don’t know how to cook even these basic staples anymore. And when you work a shit job, a large soda is a welcomed mini vacation
I remember reading Orwell's "Road to Wigan Pier" (a bit dated) and one of his observations was that a lower class supermarket would have nothing but white bread. However a middle class supermarket would have brown bread and healthier foods as well. His conclusion was, very roughly, that eating healthy was a luxury of those who were well off. Whereas the poor were struggling so much day to day that they needed short-term gratification just to get through.
Cheap food causes obesity insofar that if you have money you can buy nutrient dense food that tastes good and spend zero time preparing it. With cheap food you're constantly expending willpower to eat food that tastes like crap, expending more time making it, or are sacrificing health value. Eating pots of unappetizing starches (which really aren't as healthy as you make them out to be relative to smart fast food picks) takes time and willpower. Those are actually limited resources. Attempting to do difficult unpleasant things one after another does actually wear you down and cause negative mental health effects which unravel your plans. A starch heavy diet means you're going to get rocked by insulin spikes regularly for your troubles. Whereas if you can afford to eat leafy greens and a big hunk of fish your mental stamina will increase.
In my mind the key to a healthy diet isn't buying potatoes and rice in bulk. It's $$$. FWIW my favorite poverty meal was chili... Good mix of time effiency/cost efficiency/taste.
People who are poor and find that they are pregnant (planned or unplanned) - have many things they worry about, I doubt that 'my kid could be fat' is on the list of things they worry about and weigh on the decision to seek abortion or adoption.
Maybe your comment is meant as sarcasm, or to make people think about what they are saying could be construed as what you are saying, but sadly there are many people who think poor people have the same knowledge and forethought as them, and therefore are making terrible decisions that cost them and their kids in ways that perhaps should lead to them not having their kids.
There are so many things that people need to worry about, and added things that poor people are likely to consider. I don't see how obesity is likely a top concern. Maybe there are some situations where one or both parents are obese and they project concerns, and given that so many people are, that may indeed be a factor, I just don't think it's a top worry among people in most cases.
Of course there are plenty of parents that likely think most of the kids drinks from big brands that have pictures of fruit on the label actually have fruit or juice in them - and it seems that many or most do not ( https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/bestselling-fruit-drinks-for... )
So poor and non-poor alike or more likely being fooled by our food companies, and making assumptions that (mis)place trust in our brands and stores and govt regulations.
At least that how it appears from my limited view of the world these days.
Also, from what I hear from other parents, other kids regularly eat out, with the Greek souvlaki being the main food they get (which comes with fried potatos and pita), burgers and pizza.
Parents don't want to face their kids when the kids whine all the time, and in order to shut them up, they buy whatever the kids want.
The above, coupled with lack of physical activity due to various reasons, creates the obesity epidemic for kids, at least in my country.