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Obesity has become the most common form of malnutrition in the majority of countries
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this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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Something I haven't seen other commenters bring up that can have a huge impact, is the overall lifestyles people are living.
The unhealthiest years of my life were when I was working 2 jobs and struggling to keep a roof over mine and my 3 kids heads. Stress and depression were huge problems and money was tight, so sometimes the little bit of dopamine or serotonin from eating a "treat" were the highlights of the day. Add to that, the guilt of not being around to cook regular meals for my kids lead to 1) making large amounts of food on my one day off that could be eaten as leftovers throughout the week or 2) easy convenience foods (frozen pizzas, boxed Mac and cheese, etc) that the kids could make when I wasn't around.
Fast forward many years - my kids are adults taking care of themselves and I'm down to 1 good job that offers financial stability. My diet and health have completely changed. I actually have the time and energy to cook and plan better.
I'm not saying this to shift blame or responsibility, but to bring a different experience. When I hear (hopefully well meaning) people suggest "just cook healthier meals" it strikes me about the same as "stop eating avocado toast and you could afford a house."
Lack of free time to cook healthy food with a busier and more expensive life with salary raises that don't keep up with inflation or layoffs for many people definitely doesn't help. Healthy food ends up costing twice as much, if not more than unhealthy food. It's a multi-faceted problem and should be treated as such.
I don't think healthy food is necessarily more expensive, at least not if you know what you're doing. My personal experience is actually the opposite.
The problem, as you mentioned is the time, and the emotional and physical labor of figuring out something the whole family will want to eat and cooking it. Those things are all expenditures in their own ways, but not financial.
Well said, that's what we call canard advice. Unhelpful advice that's obvious to everyone and does no fucking good to say whatsoever. You can cook more when your primary financial needs are met, so you can just work 40 hours in a week. That and the RTO mandates going around are robbing people of a significant chunk of time yet again ontop of overemployment. When you have to work a 10 hour day and commute an hour plus each direction, then come home and "cook" something, it usually translates to heating up frozen shit and then wishing you weren't miserable.
Been there and done that, fuck hustle culture.
Yep. My boomer dad: "When I was a kid, we walked everywhere! Nobody walks anymore!" Also my dad: "I'm afraid to drive into Portland because my truck might get stolen."
The healthy food options are also usually twice the cost too.
ditch all the sugar drinks and drink plane old water, like out the toilet.
Rice and beans can be made in 1000 different ways. $1/lb uncooked.
Eating out is almost never a healthy option.
Healthy and expensive don't correlate in my outlook. I spend less eating better. Factor in not eating out and my pockets are fat, but not my ass.
This is a big deal people often don't realize. Even something as simple as an alfredo pasta will have way too much butter in it when you order it at a restaurant. (Why do you think it tastes so good?) An entire stick of butter for a single serving is quite common.
Not only is cooking for yourself significantly cheaper than ordering food, you are also significantly more aware of the calories you are putting into the food.
And that wouldn't even be so bad if we ate a reasonable portion of it. But cooking at home is preferable.
Hell no. It will have too little and probably doesn't contain proper parmesan, either. Also it's not actually simple, it's minimalist, but hard to actually get right -- Italian cuisine in a nutshell. I almost wanted to say "and be extended by starch slurry" but then realised that pasta water vs. starch isn't really something one should complain about, if anything that's a fault of sub-par noodles... anyway:
The butter unhealthy / saturated fat unhealthy thing is due to plant fat manufacturers trying to sell hardened fats as healthy giving us the wonders of trans fats, flanked by the sugar industry's "fat makes fat". While I'm at it the cholesterol stuff is the equivalent of "dead firefighters found at conflagration site, thus, abolish the fire department". Not to mention that dietary cholesterol has no correlation to blood cholesterol. And how could I forget the tobacco industry which was very successful in blaming the cardiac arrest epidemic on anything but smoking by concern trolling the scientific process.
There's processed foods which are perfectly fine but as an experiment try avoiding anything that has been invented in the last 100 years or so for a while and observe the difference. There's certainly restaurants around which cook like that but it's not going to be the ones people with two jobs eat at.
Oh and I don't think the science is completely in yet but it seems that the "gluten intolerance" epidemic is due to increased use of glyphosate directly before harvest to make wheat grow faster: It's not the gluten but some people's stomach just don't take the residue as well as others. So YMMV on being able to get proper ingredients for that experiment.
But I'm sure the free market will fix everything.
Too many people think eating healthy means broccoli needs to be 100% of your calories.
I prefer plain water myself. Not your bougie plane water.
The planes collect it as they fly through clouds. Imagine drinking water that's touched the ground...
Ground is almost 100% dirt. Drinking groundwater is just asking for trouble.
This is so fucking false its hilarious.
It's cooking -- cooking is cheaper. Cooking anything is cheaper than buying boxes.
Cooking costs time and energy, which not everyone can afford.
That's a different argument and much more valid.
Until you go on vacation to a "poor" country where it suddenly costs virtually nothing.
Are Avocados a conspiracy?
Which is why all known "advanced" civilisations (scare quotes for lack of better term) have formed around some kind of grain. Wheat in Egypt spreading to Europe, rice in Asia, Maize in the Americas: All basically don't spoil when stored properly, because dry they can be transported well, and they're also all nicely divisible. Ask the Irish whether the English wanted them to pay taxes in grain or potatoes.
Perks of living where all the food is produced.
Domestically produced crops tend to be much cheaper. Think corn in the US. The stuff is so cheap they even turn much of it into sugar for foods and ethanol for cars.
If you need to eat half as much it kind of works out though.
I spend about $12/day on ingredients, which is about the cost of a single meal at McDonald’s which is far less healthy. I don’t think that actually stands up when you look at the prices of cheap food (chicken, rice, beans, other legumes, potatoes) plus the costs of sides (fruits, vegetables).
This would make sense... If it was exactly the same everywhere with a similar level of convenience.
But it's not, America is much much worse than Europe on this, and rich countries in Europe don't exactly have less convenience than the US. How else would you explain it other than a systemic difference? American brains are not fundamentally different to European ones.
In short, some Europeans live on easy mode when it comes to weight and fitness. Their portions are probably smaller, fast food less common. There are better social safety nets reducing sources of stress.
Perhaps the food industry hasn't achieved the level of regulatory capture as in the US and so sucrose / HFCS isn't added to things as much (idk I am guessing)?
Yeah it's all about the calories in vs out but there are clearly systemic issues that, once fixed, would help us greatly in the US.
Car culture is not quite accurate. It is more like, "the entire mode of existence of anything outside of downtown areas is designed around cars and is so ingrained in laws, infrastructure, city planning, etc. that it will take many decades of committed, relentless, focused, unopposed effort to undo."
And these are systemic issues
As an Europan I can tell you, that the food in de US often tasted sweet to me. It's like people in the US lost their taste buds for bitter and sour. There is no need to add sugar to every dish, especially bread. The other thing was the amount of fat in nearly everything. Salad? With a creamy sauce or tons of oil. Of course you have to add 400g meat AND a high calories cheese to it. Served with some sweet bread and it's basically a burger in disguise. We were told that California was the healthy and rich state. If that was the healthy food, I'm starting to believe all those images on social media of fat dripping dishes.
In the end we cooked ourselves most of the time and payed the horrific price.
Try eating it for a few months and I bet you will see that people acclimate. Just like if you cut out salt suddenly processed shit tasted way too salty. Hell, I just had a peanut butter cup, first candy in weeks and it was like hyper sugar. Yuck.
A buddy of mine spends time in an easy Asian country where even desert is barely sweet and he noticed the same coming back to the states.
See, food companies figured out they could make more money selling food with cheap HFCS because it "tastes better". It's cheaper than sugar because we grow boat tons of corn + govt subsidies. It isn't banned because corruption and regulatory capture that is ubiquitous in the US.
Lucky us.
I imagine it would be pretty easy to take the list of what people buy/eat and their health issues and see clearly what foods are causing what health problems.
I bet the average cashier would even be able to point out the worst products.
But never, ever, will that happen. Grocery store is full of dead animals and animal proteins and cancer look to go hand in hand. The other big one is sugar. People are hooked on it like cocaine.
Farmer: Scratches crazily Y'all got any more of them corn subsidies?
That really depends on where you live. I know when I go to visit my parents I'm always very impressed by the older people (65+) that I see on their daily walks. They are definitely fit. It's the same when I go to the supermarkets in that area, I see a lot of fit, healthy people of all ages. Even the people working the register are in good shape.