Obesity has become the most common form of malnutrition in the majority of countries
Obesity has become the most common form of malnutrition in the majority of countries
A study estimates that more than one billion people are affected and reveals that nutritional imbalances continue to rise. Childhood obesity has quadrupled over the course of three decades
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It's hard to find "fit" people anymore. Walking around some grocery stores is mind blowing. I honestly feel bad for people. The "food" we have is shit and life is getting busier and busier.
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.
Tell me a healthy meal I can make for the same 5 bucks that I can feed 4 people with by buying a red baron pizza.
You're not feeding 4 people on a red baron pizza and no one is getting fat from sharing one with 4 people. Fast food is expensive, and so is pre packaged meals. To many people get home from work and just eat shit instead of learning to cook.
Steamed veggies are cheap, rice is cheap, beans are cheap, grab some seasoning and a pack of chicken breasts and you can eat good for a few days for less than a single trip to McDonald's for 2 people now.
You’re not feeding 4 people on a red baron pizza
I guess the dinner I served saturday night was just a drug induced hallucination then, afterall.. You seem to clearly know what I do and have done better than I do.
Cool, then everyone in your family must not be what they're talking about in this thread since you probably don't eat 5000 calories a day.
Funny how the goalposts shift from “its easy and cheap to eat healthy” to “You’re not who we’re talking about, we’re talking about other, more convenient and strawmannable people”
That's not shifting the goal post, it's calling out your bullshit that somehow a $5 red Baron pizza for 4 people is enough to make people fat. 380 calories is 1/4 of a red Baron Pepperoni pizza, if you ate one 3 a day, that's less than most adults can survive on, you're going to lose weight. So no I'm not the one moving some goal post or creating a strawman, that's your doing.
Literally no one said a red baron for 4 people will make you fat. I asked for a healthy alternative that can feed a family for the same exceedingly low price. Nothing more, nothing less. Certainly nothing to deserve your insane aggression and bullshit over.
So now you are not only shifting goal posts, you are doing the classic internet bullshit of replying to your own imaginary idea of what people said.
Ok, yes on everything but damned if Chicken is cheap. Just noted as $6+/lb the other day...
Maybe I gotta take advantage of being out in the farm fields and get some of those yard chickens.
Ouch, most major shops it's like $3 a lb on average.
Where are you located? It’s only $3.10 here, and $2.80 or less when it’s on sale (fairly often).
Western MN, in part possibly because it's a small shop
Ingredients: rice, black beans, eggs, onion, garlic.
The night before, let the beans soak. Before cooking, change the water on the beans. Heat until boiling, change the water again, add salt and let the beans boil slowly for 1.5-3h.
Slice the onion and garlic in small chunks. Fry in a shallow pot, in just a bit of olive oil. Add some oregano or whatever spices you enjoy. When it is fried to your taste, add the rice. Mix it for a bit, and then add 2.5 cups of water for each cup of rice.
Let it boil until the water doesn't cover the rice, then turn the heat down until it's just evaporating water (I like my rice dry). Meanwhile, fry a couple eggs, use a strainer to get the beans out, and add everything to the rice (or you can serve the eggs on the plate).
• 1kg of rice: 2€ • 1kg black beans: 4€ • A carton of eggs: 2.5€
YMMV but this is tasty and pretty inexpensive, if you don't count the 2h of boiling beans, but I prefer them on the soft side :P
Tacos and burritos.
Pre marinated carne asada or pork is fairly cheap. A pound can go pretty far, at least 15 tacos.
Pre marinated pork for tacos is $3.29/lb Tortillas $2.49 Premade Salsa $3.99
It comes to about $0.54 a taco. So two tacos a person it's a bit over $4. 3 tacos and it's $6.50 for a family of 4.
Serve refried beans and rice instead of another taco and it'll be even cheaper.
You could get that down if you marinated your own meat.
Black bean tacos with onion and bell pepper.
Pasta and homemade tomato sauce
Basically anything lentil based
Rice and beans
Beans and rice. (Red beans and rice, black beans and rice, garbanzo beans in curry on rice, you can make probably a hundred delicious variations on beans and rice)
A can of pureed pumpkin and a can of white beans with seasoning and a little chicken broth, heated and blended, makes a healthy and delicious soup.
A can of tomatoes, an onion, a couple dried Chiles and a can of pinto beans also makes an incredible pureed soup.
Up until recently I'd have said eggs and toast, but eggs are expensive lately. Still probably under $5 to feed 4 though.
We bought a frozen turkey cheap after Christmas and my God that made so many meals, I still have 3 quarts of stock too.
I don't think a frozen pizza is a good deal in terms of nutrition but we do sometimes have that or the Little Caesars one if I can't cook that night.
None of us are fat, husband is overweight but fit, and the rest of us are on the thin side.
Love how everyone is like "beans and rice!" and totally ignoring the energy and time it takes to make such things. And not everyone is a fan of beans and rice. At the end of the day being able to have a slice of pizza may be the only bright spot when you're living paycheck to paycheck.
and some combination of beans and rice is the only example they can come up with.
Who wants to eat beans and rice every single day for the rest of their lives?
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.
Eating out is almost never a healthy option.
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.
Even something as simple as an alfredo pasta will have way too much butter in it when you order it at a restaurant.
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.
But all plants come from the ground! It's 100% organic water it has to be healthy, it says organic on it!
the blue hawaiian water that collects near the back is the best water.
"If you want to be healthy, you must suffer and just eat beans and drink toilet water"
What a great argument for healthy living.
Go into the produce isle for once, veggies are cheap...fish and chicken is cheap. A single trip to McDonald's for 2 is like $25 or more now. You can get like 6 or 7 whole chicken breasts for that price and have money for potatoes and fresh veggies.
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.
Beyond the time/energy cost, you're comparing two different things: cooking healthy food from scratch vs. buying boxed 'unhealthy' food. Buying boxed 'healthy' food is more expensive than buying boxed 'unhealthy' food, and cooking 'unhealthy' food is cheaper than cooking 'healthy' food.
For example: I could make a huge mess of white rice and oil very cheaply and quickly. Every other ingredient I add will raise the cost and time investment. People say, "oh, just throw in some eggs/grilled chicken breast/fresh veggies and you have a cheap healthy meal!" but it's still a lot more expensive to do that (in both money and time) than to just make rice.
Until you go on vacation to a "poor" country where it suddenly costs virtually nothing.
Are Avocados a conspiracy?
Avocados spoil quickly, so they have to be transported faster. That means the further you get from the source, the more expensive they are.
More durable produce can be shipped slower, or can sit on the shelf longer, making it less expensive.
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.
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).
If you need to eat half as much it kind of works out though.
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.
When you get to 65+, the less-fit people who would be there are, sadly, dead.
Depends where you live in the U.S.
IME, it seems the coastal states have highest density of fit people.
Ironically, I've never seen more jacked dudebros in my entire life. Wherever I go, there are at least a couple guys looking like MMA fighters.
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.
It's not just any regular sugar, it's that high fructose corn syrup that's the killer. Consuming a bit of sugar here and there isn't that bad, but consuming something that is foreign to the body and accumulates in the liver is a whole new level of fucked up.
Farmer: Scratches crazily Y'all got any more of them corn subsidies?
The irony being that they suffer from the effects the worst.
It's not really foreign many fruits have an even worse fructose/glucose ratio than HFCS.
The thing about fructose is that unlike glucose the body can't burn it (pretty much) as-is, it first has to be processed by the liver, and that via turning it into fat. Evolutionarily that wasn't an issue: Fruit appears in summer, exactly the time when you want to get fat to then have some storage for the winter, what the system isn't made for is consuming the stuff all the time.
That is, HFCS in winter should be just as suspect to you as strawberries in winter.
True. And lot of these fruits come with fibers, which helps in slowing down the absorption of the sugars. That's why I barely eat grapes and any fruit that is low on fiber, nor drink any juice, period. You're right, though.
yeah, It's processed sugars like HFCS. It is not the same as sugar found in whole foods. Like cocaine is not the same as the plant it comes from.
While high fructose corn syrup isn't great for you, it's clearly not the problem. The US domestic use of HFCS peaked in the 90s, yet obesity has continued to skyrocket.
See US Foods vs UK foods. They're cramming us full of the absolute cheapest, addictive shit they possibly can legally get away with.
https://foodbabe.com/food-in-america-compared-to-the-u-k-why-is-it-so-different/
The UK also has a obesity epidemic...and so does the entire EU basically.... it's not what we eat, it's how much we eat and how little people are moving these days.
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.
True, but it entirely ignores what's driving them to buy those things. For example, if you're a single parent working two jobs, when you get home do you want to start cooking a meal, or just put a Stouffer's in the microwave and veg out?
Maybe but that entirely ignores that capitalism has been marketing to them with commercials and coupon clubs for decades and that these products advertise themselves as things they are not because the government is in cahoots with the ag industry and happily deregulates so JBS can sell more meat to chinas growing demand. How can we over look this? How about the got milk campaign? sugar drink advertised as health food by the government for decades 67% of people are allergic to. More context there is that one particularly marginalized group of americans is 3-4x as likely to be allergic, so it isn't not a racial issue also.
I cook rice in a rice maker, and beans in a crock pot. It really doesn't get tougher. Like at some point it has to get put on a plate or in a bowl and then some would have to use tools like forks and spoons to get it into their mouths. Then there are the dishes, oh man who wants to wash dishes, think of all that time saved. /s
Isn't that mainly red meats that appear to have a relation to cancer? Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe poultry is fine and that seafood has even been shown to possibly prevent certain cancers.
red meat, any charred meat, chicken is reported back and forth often depending on things like who owns the media outlet or who funded the report. Fish is all over, its too broad a net to cast. Different types of fish from different parts of the world, Trillions of them are eaten every year.
With capitalism and the government entangled in the industry. I know they use propaganda to enhance their markets. My personal outlook on it is that the stance that cancer and animal consumption has solid findings. Our government (US) actively promotes the industry and subsidizes it with billions of $$$. Then on the cdc page they list red meat as a cancer causing carcinogen. In America, profits are #1. Cancer, heart disease, and diabetes are big money makers for pharmaceutical companies. JBS is a huge company. Owners are convicted criminals for bribing politicians. They raise animals in africa and california and then ship them to china. None of this has any concern about our health. For me, I have seen and read enough to make the decision to stay away from it. Anything to keep me out of the US healthcare system.
any charred meat
You'll also find plenty of acrylamide in fried potatoes but somehow people don't end up calling vegan diets cancerous.
Here we go again, giving no accountability. Yes, healthy food is more expensive, but that doesn't mean fat people didn't eat themselves fat.
The Internet will bend over backwards to ignore the algebra of calories. Base metabolic rates are basically identical between all humans. The lie of a "fast metabolism" is not why some people are skinny.
People are fat because they consume more calories than they burn. Blaming someone else doesn't fix it.
"Oh gosh, I don't drink soda and rarely eat treats, why am I still fat?" Because you eat too much for your daily expenditure.
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.
Repeating my previous response:
I think diet is a part of it, but car culture and fast food is the biggest difference. Many developed European countries still rank much higher than the US in steps taken per day. Plus, fast food is usually a treat and not the default with a drive thru. It is back to the algebra of calories in the end.
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."
I agree with all your points, but I think knowing that you don't use your full 2,000'ish calories a day should be factored into what you choose to eat. Personally whenever I move, I always look for the most walkable neighborhoods so I can at least try to live a more passively active lifestyle.
I understand that this is a privilege, but I also eat one cheeseburger and maybe a six piece chicken nugget when I go to McDonald's. I don't need fries or a soda, because I don't burn enough calories to justify them.
I generally agree with you but I don't think you are taking into account individual nutrition. For a fat person to lose weight they need to eat less. When this happens your body literally screams at you not to. This doesn't end when you are no longer fat. It is a constant battle and your body is constantly trying to reach the fat state again. Unfortunately when you restrict your diet to lose weight, or keep it off, this itself can cause deficiencies and malnourishment.
This is very much a systemic issue but it is also tied into culture and personal responsibility. Unfortunately it is very complicated and not the same for everyone.
Understanding the concept is simple.
But losing it is hard and the battle to maintain a lower weight is a bitch and a half.
If it were easy, everyone would do it.
Not all of us are equipped with unassailable willpower (I think that's part of the executive function of the brain). Additionally, many people maladaptively cope with stress, trauma, boredom, lack of dopamine, etc., by eating. Others have mentioned factors that discourage cooking at home.
I think any dismissive, simplistic, judgemental take on weight loss is worth the toilet paper I just flushed. It doesn't fix anything. It doesn't help anyone who needs help.
About all it does is make the preachy people feel superior to those who they're preaching to .. while making the overweight people feel shame, usually a counterproductive emotion. If shame effectively motivated people to lose weight, few would be overweight because there's been plenty of fat shaming over the years.
People are individually responsible. But people are also responsible for finances. Telling someone they should manage their money better, get a better job, and spend less is equally tone deaf as much weight loss "advice".
Better to understand the whole picture and figure out what we can do to systemically and individually set people up for success rather than denigrating them for personal and systemic issues.
I think you have a twisted vision of Europe. And it's way less homogeneous than you make it seem.
And these are systemic issues
Correct, which isn't an excuse to eat your way to an early grave. We can change them, but we live in the conditions we have while working for the ones we want.
Exactly so we should be personally accountable to ourselves and externally sympathetic as well as follow known best practices like being encouraging to fat people seeking weight loss rather than encouraging fat people to associate their weight with shame in their body.
I keep myself skinny and muscular. But I’m sympathetic to people who fail to do so. I’d much rather be an annoying prophet of cycling and home cooked vegetarian meals than the bitch who tells people to feel bad about their body. Their bodies are great, they just aren’t in the best condition at the moment. People tend not to take care of things they have but are ashamed of, even if they’d be proud of it were it better cared for.
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 get what youre saying, but people are fatter in America than their counterparts in European countries. Is it more realistic to suppose we as humans are different across the pond, or is the lifestyle enforced and the additives allowed within the food Americans eat contributing to the difference?
I think diet is a part of it, but car culture and fast food is the biggest difference. Many developed European countries still rank much higher than the US in steps taken per day. Plus, fast food is usually a treat and not the default with a drive thru. It is back to the algebra of calories in the end.
You're speaking from your very tiny corner of the world. I understand that there are people who fall under whatever you said, but a big chunk just don't have the time to give a single fuck about how healthy their food is, or they can't afford it money and time wise. Some people do multiple jobs and have kids. I get what you mean, though.
Yes, but not thinking about your food choices is the problem. If I get fast food, I don't get the double quarter pounder, large fries, and a drink. I get a single cheeseburger and an iced coffee with only cream. People act like being hungry is torture, but if you meet your caloric needs, that should be enough.
Personally, I want to get drunk every day and all the time. My brain screams at me to go buy booze. I chose not to drink today.