I firmly believe the American healthcare system takes a lot of blamed for problems caused elsewhere. American healthcare is inefficient but Americans have lots of money to throw at this inefficient system. The figure that most convinced me of this was healthcare spending ballooning from ~5% of GDP to a sixth and lifespans dropping.
You could fix every problem with healthcare and Americans would still die early. Eat crap from childhood and there’s nothing doctors can do. Preventative care starts in the cafeteria.
Preventative care starts with education. What you're describing is nutritional ignorance, which I agree is part of the problem.
There is a culture of crisis management in the US when it comes to all health issues. This is the direct result, along with all the inefficiency you mention, of private for-profit health insurance.
Schools have taught kids for decades and decades, sugar is bad, and people consume more of it than ever. Why do people continue this absolutely insane strategy of taking the same approach that led to the obesity crisis and expecting it to result in anything other than mass premature death? Which is educated people, wagging their fingers, and telling them it’s their individual responsibility to be healthy?
Have you seen what grocery store are stocked with? There’s not even enough food for everybody to eat healthy at once if everybody simultaneously saw the light.
If we really wanted to solve the problem in a major way, we would literally do things like cap the amount of sugar and HFCS producers had to work with, to pre-empt this educational revolution surely causing people to throw out their fruit loops and simultaneously adopt healthy eating. Most of the food industry is controlled by a small number of conglomerates, it would be easy, but we won’t instead we let PepsiCo kill by the millions.
Even apart from health concerns, the amount of processed foods that Americans seem to consume is just staggering to me. Branded foods; it'll always seem silly to me.
I am not American so I am not sure how this works there (I forgot since the last time I was in a US store) but would that mean that the expectation is to have food labeled as "chocolate bar" or "cereals" without the name of the company?
In Europe we only have food that has a company label, except for vegetables/fruit and, in some stores, self-service stuff that you pour into bags (rice, peanuts, ...)
>A McDonald’s in France costs twice as much where a coffee costs less than half as much.
Source? According to The Economist's big mac index data[1] the price of a big mac in the euro area and the US is within the same ballpark (~10% difference max) regardless of how you measure it. If anything big macs are cheaper in the euro area than in the US. True, France gets lumped in with "euro area", but even if you compare against neighboring countries (eg. Switzerland or Sweden) the difference is nowhere near 2x.
As someone living for 10 years now in the US, and before that 3 decades in the UE: it does seem to me that McDonalds in the US (and most of the fast foods for that matter) tastes worse than in Europe or China (where I've also tried). In'n'Out and proper burger-serving restaurants in the US taste fine, but there's just something wrong with McDonalds, KFC and to lesser extent Burger King, that made me stop eating there.
You really don't want to know that answer, and you really don't want to google that answer. If you do, you might find sites that report McDs is the largest purchaser of cow eyeballs and other less commonly desired parts and pieces. Whether that's being reported by anything in the ballpark of real is up to you. But the jokes have been around for a lot longer than the interweb.
